Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Today I’m turning this post over to some of my FTI colleagues in Europe (Antoine Mialhe, Katja Murray and Valeria Fagone among others) who helped summarize the Reform of the EU pharmaceutical legislation that the European Union (EU) adopted on April 26, 2023. The summary below is provided by the FTI Consulting team in Brussels…
In Bangladesh, seasonal floods occur due to snow melt from the Himalayas as well seasonal monsoons. How can villages in Bangladesh get health care if they don’t have a boat to transport them to regional health care centers? The answer–according to a recent article in The Economist–is that the hospital comes to them. Three hours’…
Public reporting of hospital quality of care could improve the care patients receive through at least two pathways. First, patients (or their physicians) could send patients to higher quality hospitals (i.e., the selection pathway). Alternatively, hospitals themselves could have behavioral responses to the metrics and may improve quality of care in response to public reporting…
Pham et al. (2023) uses data on regulatory decisions and health technology assessments (HTAs) in Australia, Canada, and the UK and compares them to the drugs that are FDA-approved in the US. They find that: The FDA approved 206 new drugs in 2017 through 2020, of which 162 (78.6%) were granted marketing authorization by at…
A paper by Birg (2022) aims to examine how mandatory increases in rebates for pharmaceutical products impacts the use of parallel imports. She uses a policy change from 2010 in Germany which mandated increased pharmaceutical rebates to identify the impact of this change. What are parallel imports? Parallel imports are drugs that are imported from…
That is according to an article today from the BBC. NHS leaders in Scotland have discussed abandoning the founding principles of the service by having the wealthy pay for treatment.The discussion of a “two-tier” health service is mentioned in draft minutes of a meeting of Scotland’s NHS leaders in September. They also raise the possibility…
Based on one study from Sweden, the answer is ‘no’. A paper by Johansson and Svensson (2022) use data from Sweden on regional variation in drug spending. First, some background on the Swedish approach for prescription drugs spending. The Swedish national health service offers universal coverage for all residents. The system is decentralized in 21…
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…
Using data from 2006-2018 across 26 high-income countries, Lichtenberg et al. (2022) measures the relationship between pharmaceutical innovation and longevity. Innovation is measured by “mean vintage…of the drugs used to treat each disease in each country” where vintage is defined as the year of worldwide launch. For the U.S., the authors found that: …the diseases…
In recent years, the US government has had a number of proposals which aim to lower drug prices by linking US drug prices to the prices in other developed countries. This process is known as international reference pricing (IRP). A paper by Sullivan et al. (2022) explains: Federal legislative proposals to address global pricing differences…