Veterans health care news

As I do every year on Memorial Day, I like to review recent news articles surrounding health care for veterans. Corruption: On the negative side, we have news of a former VA employee stealing HIV medication. A former pharmacy procurement technician was sentenced today to 57 months in prison for stealing prescription HIV medications from…

ICER’s updated process for determining unsupported price increases (UPI)

Last month, ICER updated their protocol for identifying drugs that have unsupported price increases (UPI). Not only is ICER examining rising drug prices, but California and Vermont now have laws tracking substantial drug price increases, requiring drug manufacturers to submit information that might justify increases above a certain threshold. ICER says that the UPI reports…

Links

REITs own 3% of all hospitals and 12% of all skilled nursing facilities. DCE methods: Separating attribute non-attendance from taste heterogeneity. Causal Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAG). Remote work and home prices. Legislation to combat prior authorization delays.

Gene therapies and the ISPOR value flower

What considerations beyond quality adjusted life years and cost should be considered when evaluating gene therapies? A panel from ISPOR provided just such a discussion. As summarized an ISPOR’s Value and Outcomes Spotlight article titled “Can Pharmaceutical Pricing Move Beyond Cost QALY for Value Consideration?“, Michael F. Drummond pointed out that: …there are other values…

Coverage with evidence development for medical devices in Central and Eastern Europe

The value of medical devices caries with it less certainty than pharmaceuticals for a variety of reasons.  As described in Kovács et al. (2022) medical devices: often have multiple applications, frequently, undergo product modifications and during their product lifecycle, multiple incremental technological innovations take place affecting both clinical and economic consequences of their adoption into…

How will telehealth impact health equity?

Will telehealth widen or reduce health disparities? Telehealth may make it easier for individuals who lack transportation to get access to medical care; on the other hand, those without high-speed internet or good cell phone connections could be disadvantaged. In a recent report, NCQA examined the future of telehealth and examined how to make sure…