Abstracts by key term: NICE
With the Statutory Health Insurance Competition Strengthening Act (GKV-WSG), the Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) has been given the additional task of carrying out the economic evaluation of medicines in the form of cost-benefit assessments. In their last article for this magazine (MVF 1/2009: 32-37), the head of IQWiG, Prof. Dr. med. Peter Sawicki and two of his employees briefly presented the methodology newly developed by IQWiG and its motivation. Against the background of many years of research in health economics, the conclusion is disappointing. Neither the internationally applied standards of scientific research were taken into account, nor were the long-standing experiences of other comparable assessment agencies such as the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) taken into account in the specific design of the cost-benefit assessment. The hope remains that with the presentation and discussion of the recently commissioned pilot studies, the influence of health economics experts will increase again in order to move the German special approach in cost-benefit assessment more towards the standards accepted in health economics.