Quantifying The Value of Reduced Health Disparities: Low-Dose CT Lung Cancer Screening of High-Risk Individuals within the US

That is the title of a paper currently published (well, in pre-prints) at Value in Health. Co-authors include Jaehong Kim, Moises Marin MA, Sangeetha Ramsagar, Mark Lloyd Davies, Kyana Stewart, Iftekhar Kalsekar and Anil Vachani. The abstract is below: ObjectiveTo measure the value of increasing lung cancer screening rates for high-risk individuals and its impact…

What is HIDI?

ICER recently released a white paper titled “Advancing Health Technology Assessment Methods that Support Health Equity“. In addition to discussing a variety of methods–e.g., distributional cost-effectiveness analysis (DCEA), extended cost effectiveness analysis, multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA)–for quantifying the value of new treatments in terms of their ability to reduce health disparities, ICER also introduces the…

Challenges in implementing DCEA

In recent years, policymakers and payers have been focused increasingly not only on how new health technologies improve overall health, but also whether they can reduce health disparities. Oftentimes, however, discussions around health disparities are conducted on a qualitative basis with litlted quantitative analysis of tradeoffs between equity and effectiveness. Distributional cost effectiveness analysis (DCEA)…

Distributional Cost Effectiveness Analysis: A simple example

I have written previously about the need for distributional cost-effectiveness analysis (DCEA) which would increase the value of treatments who improve the health for individuals who currently have the worst expected quality-adjusted life expectancy (QALE). I’ve written about this in AJMC and Health Affairs among other places. One key question many individuals may have is…

Steps Health Professionals Can Take to Reduce Inequality in Health Outcomes

That is the title of an article in AJMC co-authored with Meena Venkatachalam. An excerpt is below: While decision-makers traditionally have ignored the issue of inequality, academic researchers have already developed tools to quantify a treatment’s value from reductions in inequality. Two common methods for doing so are distributional cost effectiveness analysis (DCEA) and multiple-criteria…

Using HEOR Methods to Reduce Health Inequalities

Join me tomorrow, 9/26, 12:00 PM EDT, as PRECISIONheor’s Jason Shafrin and Meena Venkatachalam discuss their recent blog commentary in the health policy journal Health Affairs on how novel methods of Cost-Effectiveness Analysis can be used to expand traditional value frameworks improve health outcomes for underserved communities. Moderated by Precision’s Kelly Wilder, there will be a live Q&A following the webinar.…