Clinical-economic appropriateness of drug treatments: designing a method that combines evidence-based information and cost assessments to construct league tables accounting for the potential number of patients.

This paper presents a method to assess drug treatment appropriateness, based on an original combination of economic analysis, pharmacoepidemiological techniques and evidence-based information. This method generates an index of clinical-economic appropriateness for the treatment under examination, by comparing the theoretically expected health gain (EHG) to the yearly national expenditure (EXPEND) on that drug and the amount of health that is thought to be gained in the 'real' patients (RHG). This paper reviews all the analyses conducted so far using this method, and discusses their main results. The primary aim of this article is to suggest a ranking approach for allocating the drug budgets of national health systems.