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Health Economics - The new kid on the block
09 Jun 2008
Assessing the benefits of a drug to society is an economic matter as well as a health concern. Drug development is expensive and only a small percentage of new drugs make it through clinical trials to gain licenses for marketing. Health Economics (HE) is becoming more prominent in the journey from discovery to sales and, as an academic subject, offers pharma candidates a new avenue for expertise and specialisation.
"Economics is the science of scarcity," according to Alan Haycox, a senior lecturer in HE at the University of Liverpool and co-author Euan Noble, an honorary research fellow at the Prescribing Research Group in a Hayward Medical Communications paper introducing the main thrusts of the subject.
"The application of health economics reflects a universal desire to obtain maximum value for money by ensuring not just the clinical effectiveness, but also the cost-effectiveness of healthcare provision."
The Office of Health Economics (OHE), which supplies the pharmaceutical, health care and biotechnology sectors with information on independent research, advisory and consultancy services on policy implications and economic issues, is mainly funded by the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI).
It also produces information for students about the importance of health economics to the pharma and biotech industries.
"Discussion of health care arouses great passion - who gets health care and how much they get is both a moral and practical challenge to a civilised society and of personal interest to us all," it states.
It suggests that the discipline of economics can "provide great insight into these issues" and stresses the importance of spending money on healthcare, which will include the associated costs of research and development, "efficiently so that we get more health care for a given commitment of resources".
In the US, one leading body promoting the application of HE and th careers of young researchers in particular is the International Health Economics Association (IHEA).
The prominence of HE is global, however. In July this year in Rome, the seventh HE conference takes place. Entitled Health Economics and Global Renaissance, the conference's theme aims to raise the profile of HE and promote it as "a global process of renewal based on development stemming from new knowledge in the scientific field".
A keynote paper presented to the sixth conference last July, for example, discussed the costs of terminal care to the US healthcare system.
The Value of Life Near its End and Terminal Care by Gary Becker, Kevin Murphy and Tomas Philipson noted that caring for the dying amounted to about a quarter of US health care spending.
"The main argument we make is that existing estimates of the value of a life year do not apply to the valuation of life at the end of life," the authors stated in the paper's abstract.
For candidates who are interested in the benefits of drugs directly related to society, with an economic slant, the growing trend for including HE in clinical trials may offer a great opportunity to exploit the openings that the subject will surely present.