Pharmacoeconomic studies in Cuba in the last 20 years

Abstract

Introduction: Cuba is a country with development in the biotechnology and medicines field, where pharmacoeconomic studies provide significant evidence for decision-making; mainly at present when the country is immersed in the "Task of Ordering" and at the same time is affected by the pandemic of the new coronavirus.

Objective: Characterize pharmacoeconomic studies in Cuba in the last 20 years.

Methods: A bibliometric research was carried out for which the Cuban scientific production on pharmacoeconomics was recovered in the Scopus database for the period 2001-2020. Bibliometric indicators were used to obtain the number of documents, years of publication, sources, collaboration, type and patterns of institutional and country collaboration, as well as co-occurrence of keywords.

Results: 648 documents were retrieved. The most productive year was 2010. The documents were published in 273 journals, 17 (6.2%) Cuban ones and 256 (93.8%) foreign. There were 449 documents (69.3%) in institutional collaboration and 199 (30.7%) without collaboration. The most productive institutions were the Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology with 82 (12.7%) and the Center of Molecular Immunology, with 77 (11.9%). The collaboration network between countries showed three defined areas: Latin America, North America-Europe-India and Spain. The most published topics were effectiveness and safety of drugs, vaccines, and those related to cancer.

Conclusions: The publications were characterized by being collaborative, with a slight predominance of national over international ones. Comprehensive economic assessments need to be expanded.