The use of the bootstrap statistical method for the pharmacoeconomic cost analysis of skewed data.

In pharmacoeconomics, the comparison of the costs of 2 different drugs used for the same treatment is of great interest. The problem is especially challenging when the drugs are likely to produce costly adverse effects in a small number of patients, which is often the case. The data are then skewed and traditional statistical methods to analyse the difference in the mean costs produced by 2 treatments may be inappropriate. The bootstrap method is presented as an alternative approach. A pharmacoeconomic cost-analysis example is presented and used throughout this article.