Economic evaluation of health interventions: a critical review

This research critically examined the health interventions economic evaluation studies published during 1975 to 2015, in order to examine the research papers in the field of research and level of commitment to economic methodological assessment quality criteria.The study carried out by searching in eight databases )PubMed (Medline), Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, Web of science, Science-Direct, Scopus, Springer Link, Elsevier(Using the Key Words )cost- benefit analysis, cost- utility analysis, cost- effectiveness analysis, economic evaluation, health (to find economic evaluation health interventions articles published between 2015-1975. To assess the quality of the articles entered to the study a validated 15 points questionnaire have been used.The search results after the screening of retrieved articles were 178 studies published in the mentioned databases. The 178 studies (includes: 33 CBA, 120 CEA and 25 CUA), comprised 58 studies in Asia, 47 in America, 45 in Europe, 16 in Africa and 12 in Asia Pacific.According to the results, three important problems for methodological quality of studies have been identified: 1. The bias: according to research perspective, some of the expenses were ignored 2. Lack of transparency: In many cases the data sources were not clear. 3. The absence of a critical review of the findings: In many articles sensitivity analysis was not done or was incomplete. Finally, the usefulness of economic evaluations published to help resources allocation, international comparisons, integration and meta-analysis of studies depends on the results of critical evaluation studies.

Keywords:

economic evaluation , critical review , health interventions