Meta‐Analysis of Cost‐Effectiveness

Systematic review and meta-analysis are widely accepted approaches for evaluating treatment effectiveness. Meta-analysis generally addresses statistical aspects of systematic reviews, such as the pooling of treatment effect sizes, assessment of heterogeneity, and statistical inference. To complement treatment effectiveness, cost-effectiveness is often conducted to encompass both clinical and economic perspectives. However, there are few statistical methods proposed for meta-analyses of cost-effectiveness, and none is used widely. In fact, meta-analysis is currently not encouraged for cost-effectiveness due to methodological and statistical complexities. In this paper, we propose simple meta-analytic methods for cost-effectiveness, which may serve as a starting point for future work. We illustrate the methods using two examples from systematic reviews on wound interventions and mental illness.