On July 9, Michael Iskedjian, BPharm, MSc , delivered a public lecture on “Pharmacoeconomic evaluation: A tool in medical decision making” within the Public Health Seminar Series organized by the College of Health Sciences (CHS) at the American University of Armenia.
Scarcity of healthcare resources, availability of diverse interventions for the same conditions and renewed interest for orphan diseases have contributed to the need for new tools in medical decision making. One such powerful tool is the micro application of health economic principals, or pharmacoeconomics, to simultaneously compare both costs and outcomes of interventions.
The lecture reviewed the principles of pharmacoeconomics, and described each step in an economic evaluation, such as definition of objectives, perspective, study horizon, analytic type, determination of outcomes, determination of costs, modeling approach, and other issues. Emphasis was given on costing approaches, including different types of valuation of resources and calculation of direct/indirect costs, as well as the various types of pharmacoeconomic analyses and their respective type of outcomes, i.e., cost-effectiveness with clinical outcomes, cost-utility with humanistic outcomes (based on quality of life) and cost-benefit with monetary outcomes (both costs and outcomes in financial terms).
Michael Iskedjian has a BPharm degree from the University of Montreal and a MSc (Pharm. Admin.) degree from the University of Toronto . He has extensive experience in both pharmaceutical practice (as manager and owner) and healthcare research (in both academia and consulting). At Pharm Ideas , the research and consulting company he founded in 1994, he has covered several areas of population-based healthcare research, including medical outcomes research, pharmacoeconomics and pharmacoepidemiology. He has published over 45 peer-reviewed articles, more than 60 abstracts, and has given more than 95 presentations at medical and scientific meetings. He has also acted as reviewer for over 25 scientific journals, and sits on the editorial board of two journals specialized in pharmacoeconomics and outcomes research.