Cost Effectiveness – Healthcare Economist

Cost–effectiveness of sotagliflozin for the treatment of patients with diabetes and recent worsening heart failure

2024-05-30Jason Shafrin

That is the title of my article with Jaehong Kim, Shanshan Wang and Slaven Sikirica in the Journal of Comparative Effectiveness Research. The abstract is below. Aim: To assesses the cost–effectiveness of sotagliflozin for the treatment of patients hospitalized with heart failure and comorbid diabetes. Materials & methods: A de novo cost–effectiveness model with a Markov structure was created…

Health gains from rare disease, specialty and expedited review drugs

2023-09-22Jason Shafrin

James Chambers has put together a series of papers looking at health gains (and cost effectiveness) using the Tufts Cost Effectiveness Analysis Registry. In these studies , he finds that treatments for rare diseases, specialty drugs, and those that receive expedited review are more likely to provide the largest health benefit (≥0.9 QALYs gained versus…

How does cost/QALY affect ICER committee votes on value?

2018-11-112018-11-11Jason Shafrin1 Comment

That is the question asked by Peter Neumann, Madison Silver, and Joshua T. Cohen in their recent Health Affairs blog article. The authors use publicly-available information from ICER reports, in order to analyze committee member votes across 48 treatments assessed by ICER. ICER reports considered were published between December 2014 and August 2018. As shown…

How restrictive value assessments affect R&D and innovation

2018-02-06Jason ShafrinLeave a comment

Health technology assessment (HTA) is growing in popularity. Already widely entrenched in Europe, in the U.S. value frameworks are being used to measure the cost effectiveness of different therapies. Some of these frameworks, however, take a narrow view of societal benefits and value to include components of value to patients or society such as caregiver…

Are PBM exclusion lists value-based?

2017-11-14Jason Shafrin1 Comment

Value-based insurance design (VBID) is a simple concept. In short, interventions that provide high-value should be covered with little cost sharing; treatments with low-value should be covered with higher rates of cost sharing or in some cases perhaps not even covered at all. A paper by Cohen et al. (2017) aims to see how far…

Applying Cost Effectiveness Analysis to all Health Care Interventions

2017-04-14Jason ShafrinLeave a comment

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…

What is the value of a QALY?

2017-02-052020-03-25Jason ShafrinLeave a comment

Many new treatments deliver significant benefits to patients. In many cases, however, the new treatments may be more expensive. How do we know if a treatment is worth the cost? Cost effectiveness analysis helps us answer this question. Cost is fairly easy to calculate but benefits are more complicated. A treatment could extend a person’s…

Cost-Effectiveness Analysis 2.0

2017-01-19Jason ShafrinLeave a comment

High drug prices are in the spotlight. While expensive, many of these treatments improve patients quality of life and even extend patient’s life expectancy. How do you balance treatment cost and benefits? Peter Neumann and Gillian Sanders have a perspective piece in NEJM describing the findings of the Second Panel on Cost-Effectiveness in Health and…

Adding the patient perspective to health technology assessment

2016-11-06Jason ShafrinLeave a comment

Health technology assessments (HTAs) aim to measure the cost effectiveness of a given treatment or set of treatments for a specific patient populations. Often, these assessments are conducted from the point of view of the payer–either a national health system or the individual insurer perspective. This payer focused perspective can often focus largely on treatment costs rather…

Extended Cost Effectiveness Analysis

2016-10-23Jason ShafrinLeave a comment

Cost effectiveness analysis (CEA) examines whether treatment benefits outweight treatment costs on average for a given patient population. A 2016 paper by Verguet, Kim and Jamison examine the concept of extended cost effectiveness analysis (ECEA) which applies cost effectiveness methodologies to health care policies. The policies are evaluated over 4 domains: (1) health gains; (2)…