Webinar No. 37 of RedETSA Webinar Program, 2023 Edition

Cost-Effectiveness Thresholds: Optimizing the allocation of health resources in the Americas

Original version: in Spanish and Portuguese

Date: August 11, 2023

• Speakers:

  • Andrés Pichón-Riviere, General Director of the Institute for Clinical and Health Effectiveness-IECS, Argentina

  • Comments by Adriana Robayo, IETS, Colombia and Luciene Bonan, CONITEC, Brazil.
• Issue: Latin American experiences in Health Technology Assessment in Hospitals
• Language: Spanish and Portuguese, with simultaneous translation into Spanish and English.
• Context:Currently, health systems face intense pressure to meet the growing needs of populations with the resources available to them. To address evidence-based universal health coverage, efficiency assessment is essential. Furthermore, most existing value frameworks agree that cost-effectiveness is a key value dimension to consider when deciding how to allocate health resources. Therefore, economic evaluations have become key tools for assessing the efficiency of a wide range of health technologies and interventions. A crucial barrier to the widespread adoption of cost-effectiveness analysis for decision-making is the lack of a universally accepted decision rule—that is, what is cost-effective in a particular country or jurisdiction.
• About the webinar

The webinar on cost-effectiveness thresholds allowed its participants to learn about the importance of making evidence-based health decisions and concentrating efforts and resources on the most cost-effective health interventions and technologies. Andrés Pichón-Riviere elaborated on the study they conducted with other professionals to estimate cost-effectiveness thresholds based on per capita health expenditure and life expectancy at birth, empirically establishing thresholds for 174 countries. A multidimensional debate and discussion was held with speakers from Brazil and Colombia who addressed, based on their experiences, the contribution of thresholds to having more efficient and equitable health systems.