Abstract

The study presented in this paper applies the principles of economic evaluation to the allocation of pharmaceutical expenditure among different drugs. The analysis stems from the definition of cost effective drugs and the type of disease under study is cardivascular problems. This sector accounts for 25% of total expenditure, the drugs mostly come in the same format and belongs to group A, i.e. those drugs that are fully paid by the State. The work is structured in three different steps: the first one consists of a review of the literature to compare the effectiveness of the different drug principles, the second step is the comparison of the costs of the different principles and the determination of the cost effective ones. The third step consists of the substitution of the most cost effective one with those used at the moment in order to determine expenditure savings. The work presented here has mainly methodological goals for two main reasons: the studies considered are mainly of American origin and costs are often referred to this context, furthermore for some drugs we could not determine the expenditure due to the limitations imposed on the use of data. In any case the analysis proposed shows that there is scope for this type of analysis.