Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
A number of studies have claimed that increased health expenditures may result in no better, or even worse outcomes. For instance, a paper by Fisher et al. (2003) looking at patients with acute myocardial infarction, colorectal cancer, or hip fracture finds that “Quality of care in higher-spending regions was no better on most measures and…
Clinical trials for cancer treatments aim to demonstrate whether one treatment is better than another. What is of most interest to patients, providers and payers, however, is which treatment works best in the real-world, not in a randomized controlled trial. Further, clinical trials often use progression free survival to measure treatment outcomes rather than overall…
Did you ever wonder what is is like having lung cancer? Or narcolepsy? What factors are most important to patients when receiving treatment for these diseases? The FDA is working to collect these answers to help guide their drug approval process. The FDA’s “Voice of the Patient” aims to “…more systematically gather patients’ perspectives…
For those attending the British Society for Rheumatology Annual Meeting in Birmingham, England, I will be giving a podium presentation on Wednesday, April 26 at 12pm BST titled “Economic Burden of Rheumatoid Arthritis is Higher for Anti-Citrullinated Protein Antibody-Positive Patients.” Come by Hall 6 to check it out along with other presentations in the Clinical and…
That is the topic of a Health Affairs blog post published today by James Baumgarder and Peter Neumann. An excerpt is below. Cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) is an important tool for assessing and pointing the way toward better health care efficiency. The number of published CEAs on health care interventions has blossomed, averaging 34 per year…
Should health insurers cover orphan drugs? Although the clear answer appears to be yes, the issue is tricky. An orphan drug is one which treats a limited number of people. In Europe, this designation generally applies to patients with a disease with an overall prevalence between 5 and 10,000 individuals. In order to incentivize innovators…
Cost effectiveness research aims to determine if the benefits of a treatment outweigh the cost. But which benefits should be included? How should we weight improvements in different outcomes? What data and methods need to be used to measure benefits and costs? These are questions that academics typically think of as within the domain of…
Many new treatments deliver significant benefits to patients. In many cases, however, the new treatments may be more expensive. How do we know if a treatment is worth the cost? Cost effectiveness analysis helps us answer this question. Cost is fairly easy to calculate but benefits are more complicated. A treatment could extend a person’s…
Value-based pricing has become all the rage of late among health policy wonks. Medicare aims to tie 90% of reimbursement to some measure of value by 2018. The AMA has endorsed value-based pricing for pharmaceuticals. Organizations such as IVI and ICER propose different approaches for measuring value as well. Typically, value is measured as the…
Health technology assessments (HTAs) aim to measure the cost effectiveness of a given treatment or set of treatments for a specific patient populations. Often, these assessments are conducted from the point of view of the payer–either a national health system or the individual insurer perspective. This payer focused perspective can often focus largely on treatment costs rather…