Pharmacoeconomics and outcomes research in Latin America: a promising and developing field.

hav We are proud to present this special issue of Value in Health: Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research in Latin America. We resent a combination of plenary summaries presented at the nternational Society of Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Reearch (ISPOR) Second Latin America Conference held in Brazil uring September 2009, and original research studies conucted in our region. We think this corpus gives a very rich icture of the current state of pharmacoeconomics and outomes research in Latin America. Like the ISPOR Asia Consortium [1,2], the ISPOR Latin Amerca Consortium promotes biennial conferences held in the reion with a two-fold mission: to help develop knowledge and apacity for health economics and outcomes research in Latin merica and to promote the use of health economics and outomes research in policy-making processes, with the goal of mproving resource allocation efficiency. This second ISPOR atin American conference, with its theme “Uniting Research nd Policy to Improve Health Care in Latin America,” had a ajor level of participation and success in the region. During the past decade or so, a large number of Latin Amercan countries have undertaken profound reforms of their ealth care systems. Even though the details are country-speific, a common issue is the need to establish a mechanism that nsures efficient allocation of scarce resources, as well as guarnteeing a wide provision of health care services on the basis of ocal population needs and equity [3]. We are currently witnessing the adolescence of the health conomics and outcomes research field in Latin America after eaching some relevant regional milestones, namely the estabishing of the Latin American branch of the International Clincal Epidemiology Network during the 1980s, development of he Thematic Network on the Economic Evaluation of Health rogrammes in Latin America (NEVALAT) in the early 2000s, the rowth of the Cochrane Collaboration, the creation of several ealth technology assessment agencies in the region affiliated ith the International Network of Agencies for Health Technolgy Assessment around 2005, as well as the creation of the ISOR Latin America Consortium and local country chapters actng from 2006 on. In addition, regional common country lliances like MERCOSUR and the Andean Community are also dvancing in harmonizing health technology assessment and conomic evaluations in their member countries. It has been a great learning experience to be the editors of his special issue, the review process of which adheres to curent standards for international scientific journals. Both the