Pharmacoeconomic analysis of ozone therapy supported by agent based process simulation and data mining

Abstract

Pharmacoeconomics is the set of methods applied to the economic evaluation of pharmacological treatments. Its goal is to determine the best possible health outcome with the available resources by comparing costs (inputs) and the consequences/benefits (outcomes) of one or more alternative choices. Ozone therapy can be considered as a powerful alternative to traditional methods in the management and treatment of several diseases, like, e.g. rheumatoid arthritis, lumbago, disc hernia, knee and hip disease, fibromyalgia, stroke outcomes, neurodegenerative syndromes and more. It is thus a very interesting topic to compare the costs and outcomes of ozone based treatments with those coming from other alternative methods, with the perspective of pharmacoeconomics. Several methods have been proposed for pharmacoeconomical analysis, including statistical and simulation tools. The purpose of this research paper is to review some of the simulation tools that could be used in this field and in particular to propose a hybrid simulation method, defined as agent based process simulation, which considers not only the involved costs, but also other non-monetary outcomes. In the same vein, a data mining set of techniques is proposed to collect data and to feed the simulation model.