Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
This is the question asked by a study conducted by Brogen et al. (2017). To see how payers use patient reported outcomes (PRO) in oncology, the authors conducted a literatures search, and searched the websites of the following health technology assessment bodies: Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee (PBAC) in Australia, Canadian Agency for Drugs and Technologies…
This seems like a straightforward question, but clearly depends on what you mean by “best”. Some drugs will be more efficacious and have more adverse events; other drugs may be less efficacious but have fewer adverse events. What if a one drug shows an 80% improvement in progression free survival (PFS), but a 50% improvement in overall…
Let’s say a you fill a 30-day prescription and the list price of the drug is $100. Let’s say that you pay a $10 copay and your insurer pays $90. What share of this $100, does the drug company receive. Most people would guess pretty close to $100, but a recent report by Aaron Vandervelde and…
I have an article up at the Washington Post‘s In Theory blog titled How we should pay for cures, according to economics. Imagine a major medical breakthrough: a cure for Alzheimer’s. Imagine that cure not only would improve the cognitive abilities of the more than 5 million Americans living with Alzheimer’s but also would give these patients…
Value-based pricing has become all the rage of late among health policy wonks. Medicare aims to tie 90% of reimbursement to some measure of value by 2018. The AMA has endorsed value-based pricing for pharmaceuticals. Organizations such as IVI and ICER propose different approaches for measuring value as well. Typically, value is measured as the…
This is the title of my latest article in JMCP co-authored with Arijit Ganguli, Yuri Sanchez Gonzalez, Jin Joo Shim, and Seth A. Seabury. The paper’s abstract is below. BACKGROUND: There is considerable push to improve value in health care by simultaneously increasing quality while lowering or containing costs. However, for diseases that are best…
Currently, pharmaceutical treatments that are used in the U.S. need to gain an approval from the FDA. The FDA’s approval is contingent on a demonstration of efficacy and safety in a randomized controlled trial (RCT). However, precision medicine makes the standard FDA approval problematic. As described in Breckenridge et al. (2016), in the precision medicine…
The American Medical Association released a statement yesterday in support of value-based pricing of pharmaceuticals. However, AMA claims that value-based pricing should follow the following core principles. Value-based prices of pharmaceuticals should be determined by objective, independent entities. They also should be evidence-based and the result of valid and reliable inputs and data that incorporate…
How do Euroepan countries reimburse for pharmaceuticals? A paper by Pauwels et al. (2014) provides an nice summary. I review that article today. With the exception of Germany, most countries had a national and/or regional drug budget. Germany is also unique in that only Germany and the UK allow for free pricing, whereas other countries…
My daughter recently went to the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach. Not only did she enjoy seeing all the marine life, but she learned that the oceans also help humans in many ways. For instance, many pharmaceutical firms are looking to the ocean to see if there are compounds created by sea plants,…