OBJECTIVES

With the rising interest of real-world evidence to properly assess effectiveness and safety, as well as cost in daily practice, health economic outcomes (HEO) and real-world data (RWD) studies are of increasing importance to the broad spectrum of health care decision makers. Our previous work has demonstrated an increase in the overall proportion of HEO/RWD publications over the last 2 decades. Here we quantified the publication of HEO/RWD studies in two common and one rare inflammatory disease; psoriasis (PSO), psoriatic arthritis (PSA) and Behçet’s syndrome (BS).

METHODS

On May 28, 2019 EMBASE was searched for original articles, reviews, and congress abstracts describing PSO, PSA and BS that were published from 2000-2019. The proportion of HEO/RWD publications was determined using search strategies derived from recommendations by ISPOR. Economic modeling studies were excluded. As this was an exploratory study, no statistical analysis was performed.

RESULTS

Absolute numbers of publications grew by >5-fold from 2000 to 2018. Most publications were counted for PSO (4,575 HEO/RWD publications of 28,937 total; 15.8%) followed by PSA (3,266 HEO/RWD of 14,379 total; 22.7%). BS accounted for 911 HEO/RWD publications (7,906 total; 11.5%). The proportion of HEO/RWD publications grew from ~3-5% in 2000 to ~22-32% in 2018. Overall, most publications were original articles (44.4%, 39.1% and 63.6%, respectively), followed by congress abstracts (29.7%, 42.6% and 15.8%, respectively) and reviews (25.9%, 18.3% and 20.6%, respectively). The proportion of HEO/RWD publications was highest among original (18.4%, 24.0% and 11.7%, respectively) and lowest among review articles (12.1%, 17.1% and 9.2%, respectively).

CONCLUSIONS

During the past two decades, the proportion of HEO/RWD publications in inflammatory diseases increased substantially, following trends previously observed for other therapeutic areas. These trends likely reflect the increasing interest and transparency to publish peer-reviewed data of real-world therapeutic and cost evidence for health-care decision-making purposes.