Evaluation of pharmacoeconomic information in Costa Rica

Abstract

Introduction: Medicines are health technologies that merit economic assessments and budgetary impact analysis to determine the efficiency of their use.

Objective: Assess pharmacoeconomic information in scientific documents in Costa Rica, in the period 2006-2020.

Methods: Descriptive research in which documentation without temporal delimitation in English and Spanish was obtained from PubMed, Sciencedirect, ClinicalKey, SciELO, Springer, LILACS, Scopus, Latindex, and Google Scholar databases with the help of keywords. The quality of the content of pharmacoeconomic information was analyzed and interpreted by using the Consolidated Health Economic Evaluation Reporting Standards and the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research guidelines that set out basic criteria in a simplified list of items.

Conclusions: The documents that report economic evaluations of medicines in Costa Rica, mainly in the last decade, comply exhaustively with the provisions of the Consolidated Health Economic Evaluation Reporting Standards and the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research, although there are aspects that must be remedied in order to achieve transparency and contribute to the accountability of the efficient use of resources that can help making decisions based on scientific evidence.