Background and Research Question: Continuous monitoring and analysis of medicine prices support policy-makers in strengthening and further developing pharmaceutical pricing policies. High-cost medicines, i.e. those medicines that account for high public pharmaceutical expenditure, are of particular interest for policy-makers. However, there is no ‚one-size-fits-all‘ approach for the performance of price surveyes and depending on the perspective of a study, different methdological approaches can be chose. The aim of this report is to develop a sound methodological design for conducting a price comparison of medicine prices in European countries. Methods: A literature review was conducted using electronic databases and, in addition, grey literature (e.g. government publications) were also searched via the Internet. Searches combined “price comparison(s)” or “price survey(s)” or „price analysis“ with “medicines” or „pharmaceuticals“ or „drugs“ and several other search terms and their affiliated truncations. Publications were clustered with regard to the chosen methods.
Results: Any price comparison in the field pharmaceutical prices needs to address at least 10 dimension: (1) type of price comparison, (2) selection of comparator countries, (3) selection of medicines, (4) price types, (5) data sources an timining, (6) reference pharmaceutical speciality, (7) unit of analysis, (8) exchange rate, and (9) weighting to account for income.
Conclusion: Answering these questions may result in different approaches for price comparisons. Given the available information a method has been choosen which seemed most adequate to support Austrian decision makers in the field of pharmaceutical pricing. The different dimension of price comparisons were summarised in a matrix of methods of price comparison to display different approaches for price comparisons.