Customer Reviews

Practical Pharmacoeconomics; How to design, perform and analyze outcomes research

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The author has his doctorate in Pharmacy from the University of Toronto. This book is simply a compilation of 20 column issues that the author had in Formulary Magazine over the period of 1996 and 1997. The purpose of the column was to respond to health care professionals who want to learn the practical aspects of designing, performing, analyzing and interpreting outcomes research and pharmacoeconomics in their own setting.
Pharmacoeconomics is an important area of research for new drugs that weighs the costs and benefits of these new drugs relative to existing alternatives. As such it has developed as a mix of statistics, economics, decision theory and outcomes research.

In my opinion, in addition to knowing the technical and medical aspects of pharmaceuticals the author of a tutorial needs a reasonably good understanding of mathematics and the related disciplines of decision theory, econometrics and statistics. This is where the text is weak.

As a statistician learning about pharmacoeconomics, I have learned some things about the subject from the journal articles and some texts. The journal PharmacoEconomics is an excellent journal that has been publishing articles for about a decade. The text "Principles of Pharmacoeconomics" is an example of an excellent introductory text that is now already in its second edition.

Unfortunately, this book under review is technically too simplistic and weak on fundamentals. The telling blow for me came when I read Appendix II "Primer on Statistics". Early on the author presents an incorrect description of p-values and statistical significance. Intuitive descriptions of dispersion and range using figures for two probability distributions are okay but although the terms variance, standard deviation, standard error of the mean and confidence interval are mentioned, no definitions formal or informal are given for these terms. Also there is some confusion between observed results and averages and their distributions.

The book has some value, as the author is an experienced pharmacist who knows something about the basic principles that make a good study. The chapter on randomized clinical trials does tell the student what to look for and what are indications of a poor study. Still the reader should beware because the lack of understanding of the basic fundamentals make the text both confusing and misleading at times.