A novel way to integrate economic information into clinical practice guidelines.

Background: Clinical guidelines are widely used to support clinical decision making, so they could also provide economic information about medical interventions to promote cost-conscious health care. We developed a new way to integrate economic information into the Finnish Current Care Guidelines.

Methods: Our development team consisted of clinical guideline specialists and health economists. We first looked at integration of economic information in clinical guidelines of other countries. Our key principle was that economic information should be integrated only to mutually exclusive medical interventions where the extensive choice of one the options will yield a significant cost differences on the national level. For the comparative effectiveness information of the interventions, we primarily looked for network meta-analyses. We then combined the effectiveness information presented as number needed to treat with prices or costs for the interventions and present the result as a cost per responder, which reflects both effectiveness and price or costs.

Results: We introduce a process to integrate and present the economic information of the selected interventions in tables in the Current Care Guidelines.

Conclusions: Our novel way to integrate economic information into the Current Care Guidelines is an effort to support cost-conscious clinical decision making to promote cost-effective health care in Finland. This process is general and could be used in clinical guidelines in other countries as well.