Abstrait

Understanding clinical efficacy: The importance of evaluating medical interventions for effectiveness and safety.

Jan Tušková

There is great interest in ensuring that health system resources are used effectively. Dictionary says efficacy, effectiveness and efficiency are synonymous. Curiously, it is in many scientific fields where there has been imposed an artificial interpretation of these terms. Efficacy, in the health care sector, is the capacity of a given intervention under ideal or controlled conditions. Effectiveness is the ability of an intervention to have a meaningful effect on patients in normal clinical conditions. Efficiency is doing things in the most economical way. Therefore, it would be more correct to define as strategic efficacy/effectiveness to the aptitude to produce an effect realized in ideal conditions and tactical efficacy/effectiveness to the same effect looked in ordinary circumstances. Efficiency would be kept in its current definition.