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

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…

Are PBM exclusion lists value-based?

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…

What is the value of a QALY?

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

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

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…