ABSTRACT
Over the past 20 years, increasing attention has been given to the development of evidence-based approaches to decision making in health. The underlying principle of the evidence-based approach is that decisions about which health care interventions to provide should be based on the evidence about the clinical effectiveness of interventions (Sackett and Rosenberg 1995). The evidence-based approach has incorporated both methodological components concerning guidelines for the design of highquality research and empirical components concerning the use of these guidelines in the identification of high-quality studies and the systematic review of such studies. In recent years this evidence-based approach has attracted the attention, interests and participation of health economists (Birch 2002). Partly this stems from the interests of decision makers being concerned with more than just the clinical effectiveness of treatments. The impact of clinical outcomes of treatments on the well-being of individuals and populations and the costs of those treatments also contribute in important ways to the evidence base for decision makers. This has led researchers in the evidence-based movement to include economists in studies of treatment effectiveness and the introduction of the notion of ‘evidence-based health economics’ (EBHE) (Donaldson et al. 2002a).
