title: Bridging the gap: exploring the barriers to using economic evidence in healthcare decision making and strategies for improving uptake.
abstract: Evidence from economic evaluations is often not used to inform healthcare policy despite being well regarded by policy makers and physicians. This article employs the accessibility and acceptability framework to review the barriers to using evidence from economic evaluation in healthcare policy and the strategies used to overcome these barriers. Economic evaluations are often inaccessible to policymakers due to the absence of relevant economic evaluations, the time and cost required to conduct and interpret economic evaluations, and lack of expertise to evaluate quality and interpret results. Consistently reported factors that limit the translation of findings from economic evaluations into healthcare policy include poor quality of research informing economic evaluations, assumptions used in economic modelling, conflicts of interest, difficulties in transferring resources between sectors, negative attitudes to healthcare rationing, and the absence of equity considerations. Strategies to overcome these barriers have been suggested in the literature, including training, structured abstract databases, rapid evaluation, reporting checklists for journals, and considering factors other than cost effectiveness in economic evaluations, such as equity or budget impact. The factors that prevent or encourage decision makers to use evidence from economic evaluations have been identified, but the relative importance of these factors to decision makers is uncertain.
authors.affiliation: Centre of Research Excellence in Reducing Healthcare Associated Infections (CRE-RHAI), Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation, Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Brisbane, Australia, gb.merlo@qut.edu.au.
authors.forename: Gregory
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Merlo
authors.forename: Katie
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Page
authors.forename: Julie
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Ratcliffe
authors.forename: Kate
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Halton
authors.forename: Nicholas
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Graves
mesh_terms: D003362:Cost-Benefit Analysis; D003659:Decision Making, Organizational; D004467:Economics; D006291:Health Policy / Q000191:economics*; D006801:Humans; D011050:Policy Making