Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
COVID-19 is a global pandemic and finding a vaccine for COVID-19 would be a boon to societal. The value would be enormous. One study found that the value would be more than 1.1% of GDP. Since global GDP is $87.7 trillion, the value of a vaccine would be nearly $1 trillion. In a recent colloquium…
How do you measure the value of new drugs? An organization known as the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review relies almost exclusively on Quality-Adjusted Life Years (QALY)-based framework. While that is a good start, many new treatments may have impacts beyond directly on health including on educational outcomes, productivity, caregiver burden. Further, society is…
If you had a life-threatening disease and were offered a choice of treatments, would you opt for a one-time cure or for weekly treatments for the rest of your life? The answer for most people is unsurprising: a cure. Cures eliminate the inconvenience of ongoing treatment, decrease caregiver burden, and reduce patient anxiety. Although we…
Measuring treatment value is difficult. Costs are relatively easier to measure but benefits are often more difficult, particularly impact on caregiver burden, productivity, quality of life and other factors. Not only that, but the “benefits” that accrue to a person may vary by individual. Some individuals may prefer treatments that are more effective, but with…
The Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER) recently announced that it would annually review treatments with significant price increases to determine if these changes are unsupported by evidence on value. I was recently interviewed by Radar on Specialty Pharmacy to discuss the topic. Jason Shafrin, Ph.D., a senior director of policy and economics at…
That is the question of interest of a new study by Snider et al. (2018) in Value in Health. The authors use six reviews by the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER) that forecast the likely national spend on specific drugs or drug classes as case studies. Their study compares these forecast to subsequent…
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…
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…
That is the abbreviated title of a new commentary on the Forbes blog that I wrote with Tomas Philipson. The full article is HERE. An excerpt is below. New value frameworks in health care have emerged due to increasing cost pressures. Although value frameworks can be useful tools, they should be used to complement the…
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…