Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
Once a pharmaceutical is approved by country regulators, how does one justify to payers that the product is worth the price. An article at Real End Points identifies a number of key trial design aspects that are vital to proving to payers that the product is cost effective. First, having having a “meaningful comparator is…
Thomas Schael, ex-commissioner at the Public Health Authority of Naples, led the implementation of a system that produced annual drug expenditure savings of €20m. How did he do it? Eye for Pharma has a revealing two–part interview. The first thing Schael did to reduce the cost of pharmaceuticals in Italy was to improve the efficiency…
Any new drug that you see released to the market probably started in a lab some 8 – 15 years ago….For every FDA-approved drug that makes it to market, 5000 to 10000 compounds were explored during the drug discovery phase. This is expected, what most companies optimize for is to have the failure occur as…
Measuring the value of research and development (R&D) is a difficult problem. Specifically, how does one measure the value of R&D on multifactor productivity (MFP). At first glance, one would expect the value of R&D to be proportional to R&D spending in a given year. However, this approach ignores that knowledge from previous years’ R&D…
Many individuals have claimed that new drug approvals are declining over time. A recent article by Lanthier et al. (2013) finds the following trends. Courtesy of Health Affairs. Drug approvals seem to be fairly steady over time, except for a decline in addition-to-class drugs. Why is this? The authors hypothesize as follows: Today we see…
How do different European health authorities use comparative effectiveness research (CER) to determine drug coverage and pricing? A recent Health Affairs article by Cohen, Malins and Shahpurwala answer just this question. Here is a table summarizing the mission and priorities of health authorities in England, France, Germany and the Netherlands. Source: Joshua Cohen, Ashley…
When a problem appears, politicians often call for more regulation. Wall Street collapses? Frank-Dodd. Health insurance doesn’t cover pre-existing conditions? PPACA. Need to protect patient privacy? HIPAA. But are there downsides to increased regulation? A paper by Cotet and Benjamin (2013) examines just this question. In particular, they examine the welfare implications of regulations that…
Increased use of prescription drugs could either increase or decrease spending on medical services. On the one hand, increased use of pharmaceuticals could decrease hospitalizations and ER visits if pharmaceuticals are able to help patients control chronic conditions and prevent the onset of incidents requiring acute care. On the other hand, increased use of pharmaceuticals…
As the 18th Annual International Society for Pharmacoecomoics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR) begins this past weekend, today the Healthcare Economist examines drug prices around the world. Drug prices in the U.S. are much higher than any other developed country. This finding is robust whether the price index is created using the U.S. drug consumption basket…
According to research from Avalere, Medicare beneficiaries are overwhelmingly choosing low-cost Part D prescription drug plans . In 2013, more than 500,000 beneficiaries enrolled in the brand new AARP Saver Plus plan—catapulting it to a position in the top 10 list of plans in its first year. With the addition of Humana/Walmart and First Health Part D Value Plus, nearly 3 million beneficiaries are choosing low-premium plans with preferred…