Seminar Briefing

This OHE Seminar Briefing summarises a seminar given by Professor Luigi Siciliani on waiting time policies in the health sector from an international perspective, and highlights which policies have worked well in the last decade in OECD countries. Professor Siciliani also touches on methods for comparing waiting times internationally and where the UK stands in the international figures. Finally, the Briefing discusses waiting time inequality by socioeconomic status.

Multi-indication pricing (MIP) involves setting a different price for each major indication approved for a medicine. As value is likely to differ across major indications, if prices paid for on-patent medicines are to reflect their value, then multi-indication medicines should have different prices across major indication, reflecting different values.

It is often argued that the demands for increased healthcare expenditure arising from an ageing population, advancing technologies, and increasing expectations, warrant higher healthcare budgets. Professor Stephen Birch argues that this reactive approach is not sustainable, and that the perceived mismatch between resources and demand is due to poor health service planning. In this briefing, based on an OHE lunchtime seminar, Professor Birch presents a framework to re-focus planning models on population needs.

Dr Steven Pearson has convened a US policy workgroup of payers, drug and device manufacturers, patients' groups, and clinician specialty societies to help develop a “value framework”.

Based on an OHE lunchtime seminar by Professor Henry Grabowski, this seminar briefing explores the lessons learned from Europe’s experience with biosimilars, and provides an analysis of how the US market may evolve.

Based on an OHE Lunchtime Seminar, this publication addresses a persistent issue: how to adequately reward innovation through the pricing of new medicines given the limitations of the information available at launch. As the author points out, oncology drugs in particular often follow the path of incremental innovation, proceeding in steps towards realising their full potential in treatment -- and even cure.

Cost-effectiveness analysis plays a limited role in US health care compared to many other countries. In this Seminar Briefing, Dr James Chambers, Center for the Evaluation of Value and Risk in Health at Tufts Medical Center, considers the current use of cost-effectiveness analysis in the US and explores the potential value of including it in decisions about coverage for medical technology by Medicare (the national public health insurance programme primarily for people 65+ years of age).

In this Seminar Briefing, Ulf Persson recounts Sweden’s experience with its approach to value based pricing (VBP). The model is a flexible approach that gives weight to cost-offsets outside the health sector and emphasises both encouraging innovation and enhancing access through such options as coverage with evidence development. He offers a series of examples to demonstrate how Sweden has addressed issues that any VBP system will face, including access to orphan drugs.

This Seminar Briefing recounts the key points made by Prof Riccaboni, from the University of Trento, at a recent OHE Lunchtime Seminar.  It focuses primarily on the reasons for a decline since 2000 in the average number of new drugs launched per year by the pharmaceutical industry.  Factors identified as important include a trend towards targeting more complex and difficult diseases, the need to adapt to dramatic changes in scientific knowledge and in R&D approaches, and substantial changes in both the regulatory and marketing climates.

Because health care resources always are scarce, decisions about what (and what not) to pay for cannot be avoided. Deciding how to value health and aspects of health care continue to be the subject of much debate. In this Briefing, Prof Donaldson takes a thorough look at the potential role of the willingess to pay (WTP) approach as a means for valuing the intangibles in health care. He examines whether more explicit monetary valuation of benefits, through elicitation of patients’ and the public’s willingness to pay, are not only useful, buy feasible and defensible in