Economic evaluation guidelines in Latin America: a current snapshot

Abstract

Economic evaluation guidelines are widespread in developed countries with fourth hurdle systems but as of yet not in Latin America. In the present article, a systematic search was conducted in order to retrieve regional guidelines in PubMed, Latin American and Caribbean Health Sciences Literature (LILACS) and the gray literature. Four national guidelines were found: Brazil, Colombia, Cuba and Mexico. We report a thorough review of these documents, as well as a comparison among them. We conclude that, despite some differences found, they are broadly similar, and are broadly in accordance with international documents. The existence of these documents, together with other experiences in the region that explicitly use economic evaluation information for health decision making clearly shows that this global tendency is gaining momentum in Latin America, although there is still a long way to go. In the near future we will be able to see if these documents were successfully used and applied for transparent and evidence-based decision making.

Keywords::

• economic evaluation of health technologies
• guidelines
• Latin America

Acknowledgements

We are really grateful to the librarian of our Institute, Daniel Comande. We want to thank the three blind peer reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this manuscript.

Financial & competing interests disclosure

All of the authors work in a non-profit nongovernmental organization (IECS) that works in teaching, research and technical cooperation in the field of Health Technology Assessment and Economic Evaluations in the Latin American region. As such, our institution has worked or works for projects funded by stakeholders with vested interest in the field, including international funding agencies, subnational or national government bodies, public and private health services financers, social security bodies and the pharmaceutical/device industry sector. The authors have no other relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript apart from those disclosed.

No writing assistance was utilized in the production of this manuscript.