In many countries, including Thailand, there is increasing impetus to use economic evaluation to allow more explicit and transparent health care priority setting. However, an important question for policy makers in low- and middle-income countries is whether it is appropriate and feasible to introduce economic evaluation data into health care priority setting decisions. In addition to ethical, social and political challenges, information supply challenges need to be addressed. The overall aim of this study was to analyse the quality, quantity and targeting of economic evaluation studies in Thailand and compare these characteristics between international and domestic literature.

This study systematically reviews the international and national literature on economic evaluation of health technology in Thailand published between 1982 and 2005. For international literature, they included only journal articles available in PubMed, EMBASE (Ovid) and Academic Search Elite (EbscoH). Established databases from four major universities in Thailand namely Chulalongkorn University, Mahidol University, Khon Kaen University and Chiangmai University were searched to identify domestic literature, including journal articles, research reports, and master/PhD theses.

Results: The study identified 41 English articles published in international journals, 22 domestic journal articles, 5 research reports, and 23 master/PhD theses. It is noteworthy that there was no difference in terms of quality between articles published in international and domestic journals. Most of them did not report incremental cost-effectiveness ratios and perform uncertainty analysis. Furthermore, the number of publications has increased significantly in recent years with substantial improvement of quality of reporting and analysis. Nevertheless, the review shows an absence of economic evaluation publications in 15 of the top 20 major health problems in Thailand, indicating a poor distribution of research resources to determine costeffective interventions for diminishing disease burden within areas of major health problem. If economic evaluation is only useful for policy makers when performed correctly and reported accurately, these findings depict information barriers to using economic evaluation to assist health decision-making processes in Thailand.