This editorial provides an overview of the evolving healthcare landscape surrounding medicine usage estimation and valuation in Ireland and offers recommendations on how improved methods of measuring health-related outcomes may help ameliorate efficiencies and the sustainability of a healthcare system.
Intra-articular injection of hyaluronic acid (HA) for knee osteoarthritis (OA) effectively reduces pain and delays total knee replacement (TKR) surgery; however, little is known about relative differences in clinical and cost outcomes among different HA products. In this study, the authors conclude that analysis of administrative claims data provides real-world evidence that meaningful differences exist among some HA products in disease-specific cost and time to knee replacement surgery.
Atrial fibrillation (AF) management represents a significant burden on the UK NHS. In this article the authors review data from 825 patients in routine UK clinical practice and describe the non-anticoagulation costs associated with AF management. Understanding these costs better may help inform future health care planning and policy development.
In this era of comparative effectiveness research, new, advanced techniques are being investigated by the research community to overcome the limitations of existing data sources. In this article Dr Christopher Blanchette and his co-authors describe the approach of probabilistic data linkage as a means to address this critical issue.
