Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
The Academy of Managed Care Pharmacy (AMCP) held an interesting webinar titled “5 Years of ICER – Insights and Impact on Payers“. Some highlights form the presentation. Most relevant information Jeremy Lee from MedImpact–a pharmacy benefits manager (PBM)–noted that their Pharmacy and Therapeutics (P&T) committee used four key pieces of evidence when making coverage and…
A paper by Buxbaum et al. (2020) examines changes in life expectancy in the U.S. and finds that life expectancy increased by 2.5 years between 1990 and 2015. These data on mortality came from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Wide-ranging Online Data for Epidemiologic Research (CDC WONDER) database. More interesting is that the…
Price increases have decelerated. While the cost of specialty drugs has continue to rise, the cost of traditional drugs is now falling. The net impact is modest changes in drug prices (<5%) since 2016. Hat tip: Drug Channels.
Based on an a medRχiv working paper by Vu by et al. (2020), the answer from an analysis of other emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) is an overwhelming ‘yes’. The authors analyze hypothetical investment returns of a portfolio of 141 pre-clinical emerging infectious disease (EID) vaccine development programs across different emerging infections without a vaccine. These…
COVID-19 is a global pandemic and finding a vaccine for COVID-19 would be a boon to societal. The value would be enormous. One study found that the value would be more than 1.1% of GDP. Since global GDP is $87.7 trillion, the value of a vaccine would be nearly $1 trillion. In a recent colloquium…
President Trump signed 4 executive orders on drug pricing on July 24, 2020. How are they likely to affect drugs prices? Passing along rebates to patients The one of the executive orders mandates that rebates go to reduce patient cost sharing: These middlemen — health plan sponsors and pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) — negotiate significant…
In drug development, clinical trials typically aim for a population that is representative of the patients who would be eligible for the treatment. While randomized controlled trials (RCTs) typically focus on measuring the average health impact of a drug across this population, a paper Basu and Gurjal (2020) argue that treatment effect heterogeneity and self-selection…
Antibiotic resistance is a problem. One study from Europe found that in 2015 there were 33,110 deaths attributable to antibiotic resistance; accounting for morbidity as well, antibiotic resistance lead to a a decrease of 874,541 disability-adjusted life years. CDC data show that antibiotic resistant bacteria and fungi caused 35,900 deaths in 2019, 12,800 deaths due…
A recent paper in BMJ Open by Moore et al. (2020) aims to estimate the cost of pivotal trials for recently approved drugs. The authors use the IQVIA CostPro Mid-Level Tool to estimate the cost of these trials. Note that a pivotal trials is one that provides ‘substantial evidence’ of benefit to justify marketing approval,…
From Cahan, Kocher, and Bohn in the Health Affairs blog: Since passage of the 2010 “Biosimilars” Act aimed at stimulating non-inferior innovation and competition in therapeutics markets, only 17 agents have been approved, and only seven have made it to market. Why haven’t biosimilars been more attractive? Blackstone et al. (2013) cites 3 key issues:…