Does value vary by stakeholder perspective?
According to Innovation and Value Initiative Executive Director Darius Lakdawalla, the answer is yes. Here is his interview response on AJMCtv.
Category: Pharmaceuticals
Innovation in small markets
The introduction of new treatment technologies typically occurs where there is a large market. A lot of innovations are developed to treat disease that affect a large number of people in the developed world because the financial returns are large. It is less likely to observe innovation in the treatment of rare diseases or diseases…
Prior authorization and opioid abuse
An interesting article by Cochran et al. (2017) examines whether health plan prior authorization rules can help prevent opioid abuse. The authors use Pennsylvania Medicaid data from 2010 to 2012. The data included both fee-for-service and managed care enrollees. The authors measured opioid abuse based on diagnosis codes for opioid use disorder (304.0, 304.00, 304.01,…
Predicting Real-World Effectiveness of Cancer Therapies Using OS and PFS Clinical Trials Endpoints
Clinical trials for cancer treatments aim to demonstrate whether one treatment is better than another. What is of most interest to patients, providers and payers, however, is which treatment works best in the real-world, not in a randomized controlled trial. Further, clinical trials often use progression free survival to measure treatment outcomes rather than overall…
Highlights from the 2017 ISPOR Conference
Over the past few days, I have been attending the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR) 2017 Annual Conference in Boston. The session had a number of interesting presentations. While I was not able to catch them all, below are links to a few highlights. Darius Lakdawalla, Defining and Measuring Value in Healthcare…
Will the UK become a “desert for healthcare innovation”?
That is the claim made by the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI). Lisa Anson, who took over as ABPI president last week, told The Times that the financial squeeze on the NHS threatened the whole of Britain’s £30 billion life sciences sector as firms would reconsider working in the UK. ABPI asked for the…
FDA Hedges
Pharmaceutical companies face major risk. There is risk that the drugs they are researching don’t work (e.g., lack of efficacy) or are not safe. There is risk that health insurers or government payers will not cover their treatment. And there is risk that the FDA will not approve a drug after a Phase III clinical trial.…
Applying Cost Effectiveness Analysis to all Health Care Interventions
That is the topic of a Health Affairs blog post published today by James Baumgarder and Peter Neumann. An excerpt is below. Cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) is an important tool for assessing and pointing the way toward better health care efficiency. The number of published CEAs on health care interventions has blossomed, averaging 34 per year…
Does drug detailing affect prescribing patterns?
The obvious answer seems to be ‘yes’. Why would pharmaceutical companies spend billions of dollars on drug detailing (i.e., visits by pharmaceutical representatives to physicians to explain drug benefits) and drug samples if they don’t work? When I say billions, I mean billions: A new study by Datta and Dave (2017), however, finds that drug…
Drug approval and reimbursement when clinical trials use surrogate endpoints
An interesting paper from some of my colleagues at Precision Health Economics: Approval of new drugs is increasingly reliant on “surrogate endpoints,” which correlate with but imperfectly predict clinical benefits. Proponents argue surrogate endpoints allow for faster approval, but critics charge they provide inadequate evidence. We develop an economic framework that addresses the value of…