Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
That is the quote from Iga Lipska, MD, PhD, MPH from the Medical University of Gdańsk, Clinical Trials Center in Warsaw, Poland. She was one the panelists at the ISPOR Europe Plenary speech. There were a lot of good sessions, many of which I will be posting on throughout the week. The first plenary was…
That is according to a paper by Weaver et al. (2022). The authors use expenditure data from the Disease Expenditure Project and DALYs from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2017. Evaluating the data from 1996-2016, the authors find that: Across all causes of health care spending and disease burden, median spending was US$114,339 per…
Last month, the Office of Health Economics published a report titled “Health Technology Assessment of Gene Therapies: Are Our Methods Fit for Purpose?” I summarize some of the key challenges and solutions below. Challenge #1: Initial assessment of clinical effectiveness. Since gene therapies often target rare disease, the sample size from clinical trials is often…
How does ICER plan to determine whether health plans offer fair access to pharmaceuticals? I summarized their approach last year as outlined in their white paper titled “Cornerstones of ‘Fair’ Drug Coverage: Appropriate Cost-Sharing and Utilization Management Policies for Pharmaceuticals.” Last month, final protocol for their “Barriers to Fair Access Assessment“. While the approach follows…
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…
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…
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…
That is the name of a recent paper in Value in Health from three of pharmacoeconomics field’s leading scholars: Peter Neumann, Lou Garrison and Richard Wilke. The paper begins by comparing the ISPOR value flower against the recommendations from the Second Panel on Cost Effectiveness in Health and Medicine. Intervention types. The ISPOR Value Flower…
In the United Kingdom, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) made an update to their health technology evaluations manual in January 2022. Of particular interest, section 6.2 of the manual states that the review committee “will consider the associated absolute and proportional QALY shortfall.” The committee defined QALY shortfall two ways: Absolute…
Check out an event this Friday, December 10, at 10am EST/7am PST on at The Hill on Rare Diseases: A Conversation on Value Assessments. A summary of the topic and the speaker list are below. One in 10 Americans suffers from a rare disease—that’s 30 million Americans who need access to treatment. According o the NIH,…