Economic evaluation as a decision-making tool in health care

Rīga Stradiņš University, Latvia

Abstract

For the assessment of the health care system efficiency result-oriented indicators should be exploited much more actively as without specific indicators oriented to the evaluation of the patient’s health outcomes it is impossible to acquire reasonable evidence for the effectiveness of the functioning of the health care system that has the decisive role for further decisions in the age of the evidence-based medicine. The main groups of the treatment results’ indicators are clinical, economic and patient-reported outcomes (PROs), and all these groups of outcomes should be considered to make the most objective economic evaluation. This research has been determined to investigate applying of PROs as a relatively new tool in evaluation of the health care in Latvia. The results of the scientific publications review show that the positive trend in using of the PROs in Latvia is observed, but the involvement of patients in treatment’ process assessment is not enough active yet. The relevant problems and possible suggestions for improvement of this process are discussed in the article.