Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
A paper by Haque et al. (2022) inJAMA Internal Medicine looks at the price paid for drugs with indicated uses in both medical (i.e., human) and veterinary (i.e., animal) practice. The authors examined 200 human medications with the most prescription fills as identified in the ClinCalc database, who also had the same active ingredient in…
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…
An article from the Health Affairs forefront article from Ho and Vertinsky (2022) argues ‘yes’, but the use of any such such information for cost-based pricing is short-sighted. The Ho and Vertinsky say drug cost disclosure would be useful because (i) currently there is little information on the cost of drug development, (ii) it is…
A paper by Gracia, David and Conti (2022) in Health Affairs Forefront poses the question ‘how do financial incentives impact venture capitalist’s (VC) investment decisions in early-stage biotech companies, and ultimately innovation?’ To get the answer, the authors interviewed 5 venture capitalists to get their thoughts. Based on these interviews, the authors had 7 key…
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…
FDA wants drugs to be more targeted to factors that impact patient’s lives in ways that they care about. To achieve this goal, last month FDA released a third guidance document on patient focused drug development generally applicable to a variety of clinical outcome assessments (COAs), including patient-reported outcome (PRO), observer-reported outcome (ObsRO), clinician-reported outcome…
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…
Prior authorization is a pain. A paper by Howell et al. (2021) found that the total cost of various utilization management schemes is $93.3 billion of which physicians devote $26.7 billion worth of time to navigate utilization management systems. Payers would argue that prior authorization helps to control costs and stop the prescribing of unnecessary…
While many patients and physicians feel that it is increasingly difficult to get insurance to cover new treatments, a JAMA Viewpoint (Resneck 2020) demonstrates this trend numerically. Prior authorization requirements increased from 8% to approximately 24% of covered drugs on Medicare Part D plans between 2007 and 2019.1 In 4 therapeutic classes (including antidepressants, autoimmune disease…
COVID-19 vaccines have had a huge beneficial impact on patient health. One study found that between December 2020 and June 2021, COVID-19 vaccines saved 240,000 lives (Vilches et al. 2022). The figure below shows that as the Delta and Omicron variants spread in the fall of 2021, COVID-19 vaccines prevented significant number of deaths according…