Recommendations on Pharmacoeconomic guidelines for Turkey considering reference countries: A scoping review

Objectives: Through the years, assessing the value for money or cost-effectiveness of treatments has become increasingly important. In this context, the price regulations have become stricter in Turkey in contrast to regulations on pharmacoeconomic (PE) assessments. Considering lack of guidelines on PE evaluations, an urgent need arises for pharmacoeconomic regulations in Turkey.

Methods: In this study, we conducted a scoping review on pharmacoeconomic guidelines with specific interest for Turkey's reference countries. Our search covered PubMed, Web of Science, and Cochrane databases, without date restriction. In addition, to provide further background for recommendations on pharmacoeconomic guidelines, a brief review of the Turkish medicines’ reimbursement system and those in reference countries was conducted, in the framework of the respective healthcare systems, explicitly considering the “Health Systems in Transition” series published by World Health Organization. The comparison tool and relevant databases of the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research were also reviewed.

Results: After selection, 6 relevant publications were included in this review. Regarding review on reimbursement regulations in reference countries, only Greece came out as having no formal PE guidelines.

Conclusions: The set of recommended PE guidelines for Turkey were therefore based on France, Portugal, Spain, and Italy's guidelines and literature data. Our recommended set of guidelines can form the basis for further discussion and help determining the final set for formal embedding in the Turkish regulatory procedure for reimbursement of drugs.