Unbiased Analysis of Today's Healthcare Issues
That is one of the key questions from the IVI”s recent Value Blueprint paper titled “Prioritized Attributes to Better Define and Measure Innovation in Health Technology Assessment“. The expert roundtable convened by IVI examines not only whether there is a consensus about how to implement the value element (“method readiness”) but also if their is…
How does ICER plan to determine whether health plans offer fair access to pharmaceuticals? I summarized their approach last year as outlined in their white paper titled “Cornerstones of ‘Fair’ Drug Coverage: Appropriate Cost-Sharing and Utilization Management Policies for Pharmaceuticals.” Last month, final protocol for their “Barriers to Fair Access Assessment“. While the approach follows…
On June 10, I will be presenting at ISPOR’s Summit on “Value Assessment: New Insights, Approaches, and Applications,” which will highlight evolving practices, new methods, and practical applications in value assessment. The Summit will provide a multistakeholder perspective, including recent developments in the incorporation of uncertainty and risk aversion into value measures, covering both the…
A new drug comes on the market. Is the health benefit worth the cost? What is it’s value? Value assessment frameworks are one way to answer this question. Value frameworks take the evidence of the treatments benefits, risk and cost and output some notion of the treatment’s value. Ideally, if anyone applied a given value…
Cost effectiveness analysis aims to capture identify (and monetize) all of a treatments benefits, risk and costs and then determine if the treatment is worth the money. Traditionally, however, benefits, risk and costs only related to benefits that accrue to the health care system. Many studies in the academic literature have advocated for a societal…
The Academy of Managed Care Pharmacy (AMCP) held an interesting webinar titled “5 Years of ICER – Insights and Impact on Payers“. Some highlights form the presentation. Most relevant information Jeremy Lee from MedImpact–a pharmacy benefits manager (PBM)–noted that their Pharmacy and Therapeutics (P&T) committee used four key pieces of evidence when making coverage and…
The answer comes in an interview my colleague Meena Venkatachalam and I had with the American Journal of Managed Care. Check out the full intereview here.
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…
According to a paper by Stevens et al. (2020), the answer is ‘yes’. One clear reason why it would change is if the drug’s price changes. Even if that is not the case, however, the drug may be more or less effective over time. For instance, physicians may improve their ability to manage side effects…
In general, health economists would like to have health insurers cover treatments that are welfare improving in the Pareto sense. This means, if a treatment provides more expected benefits than costs and no one is worse off (in expectation), then this treatment should certainly be covered. It could be the case, however, that people care…