Review of resource-use measures in UK economic evaluations

Economic evaluations in clinical trials employ a range of approaches for estimating patients’ use of healthcare and other resources. These include: abstraction of data from routine medical records (e.g. patient notes, electronic medical records), use of dedicated sections within case report forms, and questionnaires (or diaries or logs (Marques et al., 2013)) for patients, healthcare professionals, researchers, or informal carers to complete (Figure 1) (Johnston et al., 1999, Evans et al., 2000). A review of trial-based economic evaluations found a widespread dependence on patient recall for resource-use estimation in the UK (Ridyard et al., 2010).