Pharmacoeconomics and Pharmaceutical Administration

Program Description:

"Healthy human" is the most precious asset of societies and therefore has been the focus of most national and international development strategies. However, most of the time decision makers are faced with the fixed budget problem, where they have to decide how to allocate or ration resources between patient groups. Managing health sector is one of the major challenges of the today's most governments around the globe. Faced with increasing healthcare costs, many countries are now requiring evidence of cost effectiveness to convince decision makers to include the proposed medicine to their national medicine list. This may cause more efficient pricing of the medicines. In recent decades decision makers in healthcare system have realized the importance of prioritization in the health sector and health technology assessment (HTA) has been extensively used by policy makers in developed countries. HTA is a multidisciplinary activity which systemically evaluates the effect of a technology on health, on the availability and distribution of resources and on other aspects of health system performance such as equity and responsiveness. 

Today Pharmacoeconomics can be used as a tool of management, which could be applied to strategic and operational decisions about pharmaceutical development, production and consumption of medicines. Pharmacoeconomics could provide direction for allocation of limited resources in healthcare system. Pharmacoeconomics use economic approaches are applied to pharmaceuticals to guide the use of limited resources to yield maximum value to patients, health care payers and society in general. Pharmacoeconomics & Pharmaceutical Administration, as an post graduate discipline in Iran pharmacy education system started since 2005.

Definition

The graduates will be expert in using economics and policy principles in appropriate allocation of resources available in healthcare system in order to prove equitable access to the most cost-effective clinical interventions. In addition, they learn how to efficiently allocate resources in research and development activities in pharmaceutical industry.

Objectives:

• Application of the economic & management sciences in the pharmacy education, research, training and policy making.
• Enhancing knowledge of pharmacists in the fields of economic & policy sciences.
• Leading & supervising research in the fields of Pharmacoeconomics and pharmaceutical administration & policy.