Why you should include dynamic drug pricing in your CEA model

A Health Affairs Forefront paper by researchers Melanie Whittington, Peter Neumann, Joshua Cohen, and Jonathan Campbell makes a compelling case for incorporating drug price dynamics into cost effectiveness analysis. The first questions many people may have is ‘how do drug prices usually change over time?’ A drug’s net price often increases following launch and may…

CMS = HTA?

The U.S. is one of the the few developed nations without a government-run health technology assessment (HTA) body. Or are they? A recent perspective in the New England Journal of Medicine by Peter Neumann and Sean Tunis argues that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) already is serving as a de facto HTA…

Challenge in HTA for gene therapies

Last month, the Office of Health Economics published a report titled “Health Technology Assessment of Gene Therapies: Are Our Methods Fit for Purpose?” I summarize some of the key challenges and solutions below. Challenge #1: Initial assessment of clinical effectiveness. Since gene therapies often target rare disease, the sample size from clinical trials is often…

Gene therapies and the ISPOR value flower

What considerations beyond quality adjusted life years and cost should be considered when evaluating gene therapies? A panel from ISPOR provided just such a discussion. As summarized an ISPOR’s Value and Outcomes Spotlight article titled “Can Pharmaceutical Pricing Move Beyond Cost QALY for Value Consideration?“, Michael F. Drummond pointed out that: …there are other values…

Coverage with evidence development for medical devices in Central and Eastern Europe

The value of medical devices caries with it less certainty than pharmaceuticals for a variety of reasons.  As described in Kovács et al. (2022) medical devices: often have multiple applications, frequently, undergo product modifications and during their product lifecycle, multiple incremental technological innovations take place affecting both clinical and economic consequences of their adoption into…

NICE’s new Severity Adjustment

In the United Kingdom, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) made an update to their health technology evaluations manual in January 2022. Of particular interest, section 6.2 of the manual states that the review committee “will consider the associated absolute and proportional QALY shortfall.”  The committee defined QALY shortfall two ways: Absolute…