Launched at a seminar in his honour May 2014, Portrait of a Health Economist: Essays by Colleagues and Friends of Bengt Jönsson is an impressive collection of essays commemorating Bengt’s lifetime contribution to health economics. He was one of the true pioneers in the field – his 1976 doctoral thesis was on cost-benefit analysis in public health and medical care. He has since published hundreds of papers, reports and book chapters worldwide.
Towse and Drummond take a critical look at deficiencies in policy and suggest revisions.
An editorial just published by OHE’s Adrian Towse and Michael Drummond of the University of York argues that current orphan drug policies are ‘not fit for purpose’ and discusses the issues that need to be clarified as the basis for policy revisions.
This research explores which approaches to pricing can produce the greatest efficiency and access to medicines within and across countries.
OHE collaborated on two articles published in the journal Health Economics recently.
Focusing on England, these two presentations describe the core economic considerations in making the most of targeted therapy.
OHE's Adrian Towse participated in a two-day workshop convened by the Biotherapy Development Association to discuss the process and problems that surround decisions about pricing and reimbursement for innovative oncology medicines in Europe.
OHE's contributions focused on approaches to implementing UK value-based assessment and the details of creating an EQ-5D-5L value set for England.
The Health Economists’ Study Group (HESG), based in the UK, was founded in 1972 to support and promote the work of health economists. Its members are from academic, commercial, and government settings.
A pilot study demonstrated the value of involving a range of stakeholders in MCDA for rare disease therapies.
According to a study just published by the Office of Health Economics (OHE) and its collaborators, medicines for rare disease may be effectively valued using an innovative approach -- multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) -- that can include all relevant stakeholders, including patients’ groups. Assessing value for treatments of rare diseases has long been a challenge.
The extended analysis is outlined in the slide presentation in this post.
PharmacoEconomics recently published OHE’s study projecting medicines expenditure in the UK to 2015. The PPRS 2014 Heads of Agreement was announced on 6 November 2013, which outlines the terms of the five-year deal between the pharmaceuctical industry and the government in the UK.
This research varies from other analyses in using a product-level, rather than a macro, approach.
PharmacoEconomics has just published OHE’s study projecting medicines expenditure in the UK to 2015. ( The methodology for this research varies from earlier approaches in using a product-level, or “bottom-up”, approach, rather than a top-down, macro perspective.
Best practices for performance-based risk-sharing arrangements in health care are described in detail in this new ISPOR report, developed by a task force co-chaired by Professor Lou Garrison, University of Washington and Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the OHE, and Professor Adrian Towse, Director of the OHE. The report appeared in late August in Value in Health. The idea of paying only for health interventions that work at least as well as expected is intuitively attractive.
OHE was involved in several sessions at the 9th World Congress of the International Heath Economics Association (iHEA). Prof Adrian Towse, OHE’s Director, and Prof Lou Garrison, OHE Visiting Senior Research Fellow for 2012-13 and a professor at the University of Washington, took part in a session focusing on barriers to utilisation and delivery of health service in developing countries.
