Evidence-Based Medicine and Healthcare Quality in the Context of Information Failure: The Case of the UK Fertility Sector

Minyan Zhu

PharmacoEconomics - Open, 2021, vol. 5, issue 4, No 1, 576 pages

Abstract: Abstract Economic incentives in the context of a particular type of market failure—asymmetric information (which takes place when quality information relating to treatment is not available to patients before purchasing the treatment)—are highly relevant to the understanding of the lack of clinics’ incentives to disclose reliable evidence (relating to treatment quality) in the practice of evidence-based medicine. Based on the case study of the UK in vitro fertilisation (IVF) sector, I show that inadequate quality provision (relating to treatment effectiveness and safety) can be associated with a lack of voluntary disclosure of reliable evidence in the practice of evidence-based medicine. In the absence of sufficient economic incentives on clinics to voluntarily acquire and disclose evidence, I discuss the rationale for legislation requiring mandatory evidence disclosure as a possible mechanism to facilitate the acquisition and revelation of evidence. I do so by drawing evidence from the economic literature relating to the impact of such legislation on firms’ quality improvement. Practical implications for implementation are discussed (and illustrated with examples in the context of the UK IVF sector) with the purpose to facilitate the role of regulators in setting the standards for evidence disclosure to improve interpretability of such evidence, together with the role of patients in engaging with clinics and verifying such evidence to improve its reliability and, ultimately, quality of care.

Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s41669-021-00285-4 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:pharmo:v:5:y:2021:i:4:d:10.1007_s41669-021-00285-4

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/adis/journal/41669

DOI: 10.1007/s41669-021-00285-4

Access Statistics for this article

PharmacoEconomics - Open is currently edited by Timothy Wrightson and Christopher Carswell

More articles in PharmacoEconomics - Open from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().