BIOtech Now
Dan Durham
It’s an important and exciting time in the biotech industry. Spending on prescription drugs has proven to be stable and undeniably low heading into 2018, and today there are approximately 7,000 medicines in development waiting to change the way we treat and cure diseases. Yet as hardworking families and individuals are learning first-hand, health care costs continue to rise so it’s important that we make the necessary adjustments to promote smarter spending across all health care sectors.
Hospitals comprise a significant share of health care spending in America – and physician and clinical services are not far behind. But with a new generation of cures and breakthrough medicines on the way, it’s imperative that our reimbursement and delivery systems ensure that patients are able to access the treatments they need at a reasonable out of pocket cost.
To achieve this goal, I’m excited to share that the Innovation and Value Initiative (IVI) has launched its much anticipated Open-Source Value Project (OSVP) – a transparent and holistic approach for estimating the value of medical technologies in a way that puts patients first, allows for a broad range of perspectives, incorporates the latest available evidence, and considers the full range of scientifically defensible approaches.
As part IVI’s Strategic Advisory Board, I’ve had the opportunity to work with experienced leaders from across the health care system and the results have been encouraging. The advanced OSVP will help facilitate a more constructive dialogue between stakeholders with different value perspectives and minimize barriers that stand between innovation and the patients who depend on it. As Darius Lakdawalla, Executive Director of IVI and Quintiles Chair in Pharmaceutical Development and Regulatory Innovation at the University of Southern California said:
“The IVI Open-Source Value Project will give payers and health care systems the ability to make clear, data-based decisions about health care spending, provide key insights to patients and providers making shared value-based decisions, and advance the science of value assessment.”
This is an important achievement and one that comes not a moment too soon. Value assessments are not new, but the models that have existed before today—particularly those developed by the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review or ICER—have not been fully transparent and lack sufficient input from the full breadth of healthcare stakeholders.
Many stakeholders have recommended ICER make changes to address these deficiencies, including organizations that advocate for patients. In a recent letter, BIO asked ICER to “make their modeling assumptions and the analytical model itself easily accessible to all stakeholders to facilitate independent validation” and to make sure its models “are available in a timely manner” to maximize public input.
While ICER has failed to embrace this level of transparency, IVI provides a transparent and open-source model that promises to deliver a completely different approach. In the coming months, IVI will publish research methods, assumptions, results, and external reviews to openly facilitate the evaluation and replication of their work. To learn more about this exciting initiative, head over to: http://www.thevalueinitiative.org/open-source-value-project/
Powered by WPeMatico