Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Should payers cover a new oncology treatment targeting specific biomarkers across multiple tumor types? One the one hand, one could require a separate trial for each tumor type. While this would be convincing evidence, it also is very expensive to conduct clinical trials for every tumor type, particularly if treatment efficacy is homogenous across tumor…
A paper by Drummond et al. (2023) examines how health technology assessment bodies deal with the challenge of value assessment for cell and gene therapies (also known as Advanced Therapy Medicinal Products (ATMPs) in Europe). To do this the authors: …undertook i) a targeted review of the literature on the clinical and economic evidence needs…
Why is it so hard to estimate the value of orphan drugs indicated for the treatment of rare diseases? There are a variety of reasons, but a scoping review by Grand et al. (2024) provides a nice summary of these issues. Key challenges include small sample sizes for nearly all parameters and lack of data…
The term “Carer QALY” was coined in a paper by Mott et al. (2023) and is identified as the case where “it is possible for an effective treatment that provides survival gains (with relatively little or no QOL gain) to appear less effective than the comparators when carer QOL is considered.” While the term “Carer…
Many health policy experts–including myself–have noted that treatments that help reduce health disparities may be especially valuable whereas those that exacerbate inequalities may be somewhat less valuable than predicted by standard cost-effectiveness analysis. A key question is, health disparities over what dimension(s)? Is it race? Income? Education? O’Nell et al. (2013) developed the PROGRESS framework.…
The Innovation and Value Initiative (IVI) and AcademyHealth have developed a consensus document titled “A Research Framework to Understand the Full Range of Economic Impacts on Patients and Caregivers” Direct Medical Costs: Patient or caregiver costs paid to a healthcare provider or healthcare system. Non-Clinical Healthcare Costs: Costs that are a direct result of seeking…
This week ICER released a number of potential changes to their value framework. A summary of these are listed in the table below.
That is one of the key questions from the IVI”s recent Value Blueprint paper titled “Prioritized Attributes to Better Define and Measure Innovation in Health Technology Assessment“. The expert roundtable convened by IVI examines not only whether there is a consensus about how to implement the value element (“method readiness”) but also if their is…
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…