Economic evaluation in telemedicine – still room for improvement

It has been reported that economic evaluations of telemedicine are less adherent to methodological standards than economic evaluations in other fields. Systematic reviews also show that most studies evaluate benefits in terms of the cost savings, with no assessment of the health benefits for patients. In a recent review of economic evaluations, I found 33 articles that measured both costs and non-resource consequences of using telemedicine in direct patient care. This represents a considerable increase compared to previous reviews. The articles analysed were highly diverse in both study context and applied methods. Most studies used multiple outcome measures, such as diagnostic accuracy, blood glucose levels, wound size or quality-adjusted life-years gained. The effectiveness measures appeared more consistent and well reported than the costings. Objectives, study design and choice of comparators were mostly well reported. However, most studies lacked information on perspective and costing method, few used general statistics and sensitivity analysis to assess validity, and even fewer used marginal analysis. These shortcomings in economic evaluation methodology are relatively common and have been found in other fields of research.