Adherence of Health Economic Evaluations to Country Specific Guidelines: A Protocol for Systematic Review

Economic evaluation adherence to guidelines: systematic review protocol

Abstract

Background & Objectives: Over the years, an increasing number of developed and developing countries have formulated guidelines for conduct of economic evaluations. However their relevance to the analyst has rarely been evaluated. It is unclear whether the analysts adopt a particular set of guidelines while undertaking economic evaluation, and if yes to what extent. We propose to undertake a systematic review to assess the adherence of the published economic evaluations to existing country specific guidelines for three countries. Depending on the availability of a published guideline in English language we randomly selected one country each in the high income, upper middle income and lower middle income group namely Canada, South Africa and Egypt

Methodology: A systematic literature search will be undertaken in three databases which include PubMed, EmBase and York CRD databases to identify health economic evaluations pertaining to Canada, South Africa and Egypt. Two reviewers will independently undertake a title and abstract screening followed by full text screening to identify studies that are full economic evaluation pertaining to the health sector and published one year after the publication of the country specific guideline. Data will be extracted on key principles of economic evaluation. Adherence to the recommendation made in the country specific guidelines will be scored equally to calculate mean adherence scores. Quality will be assessed using Drummond’s checklist.

Conclusion: The findings of this review will help to assess mean adherence to guidelines. Also, we will be able to identify individual factors showing poor adherence and factors responsible. Ultimately the findings will aid revision of existing guidelines and development of new guidelines.