Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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)…
What are the best practices for conducting comparative effectiveness research in the real-world? One proposed best practice guildelines are the Good Research for Comparative Effectiveness (GRACE) guidelines. However, most studies do not follow these guidelines. A paper by Dreyer, Bryant and Velentgas (2016) assembled 28 observational comparative effectiveness articles published from 2001 to 2010 that compared treatment effectiveness and/or…
On it’s website, the Instititute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER) claims that it is “…a trusted non-profit organization that evaluates evidence on the value of medical tests, treatments and delivery system innovations and moves that evidence into action to improve the health care system. ” A recent article in Huffington Post however, disagrees. They make two key…
What is cost effectiveness analysis or CEA? One definition is that CEAs–at least in the field of health care–measure the difference or ratio between cost of care and the benefits of care for a given intervention compared to an alternative treatment strategy. The intervention could be a new surgical procedure, a drug, a behavior modification program or any other…