Complexity and reflexivity: Two important issues for economic evaluation in health care

Economic evaluations are analytic techniques to assess the relative costs and consequences of health care programmes and technologies. Their role is to provide rigorous data to inform the health care decision-making process. Economic evaluation may oversimplify complex health care decisions. These analyses often ignore important health consequences, contextual elements, relationships or other relevant modifying factors, which might not be appropriate in a multi-objective, multi-stakeholder issue. One solution would be to develop a new paradigm based on the issues of perspective and context. Complexity theory may provide a useful conceptual framework for economic evaluation in health care. Complexity thinking develops an awareness of issues including uncertainty, contextual issues, multiple perspectives, broader societal involvement, and transdisciplinarity. This points the economic evaluation field towards an accountability and epistemology based on pluralism and uncertainty, requiring new forms of lay-expert engagement and roles of lay knowledge into decision-making processes. This highlights the issue of reflexivity in economic evaluation in health care. A reflexive approach would allow economic evaluators to analyze how objective structures and subjective elements influence their practices. In return, this would point increase the integrity and reliability of economic evaluations. Reflexivity provides opportunities for critically thinking about the organization and activities of the intellectual field, and perhaps the potential of moving in new, creative directions. This paper argues for economic evaluators to have a less positivist attitude towards what is useful knowledge, and to use more imagination about the data and methodologies they use.