Seminar Briefing

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

Antibacterial drug resistance is a serious and growing worldwide problem that threatens our ability to cure traditionally treatable diseases and to successfully perform numerous surgical procedures that rely on antibacterials. The current situation is due primarily to two causes: inappropriate use in humans and animals and the decline in the development of new antibacterials, largely because of lower returns on investment in R&D.

Priority Review Vouchers (PRVs) are awarded in the US to companies that gain approval there for a new drug for one of sixteen tropical diseases, under a law passed in 2007. The PRV entitles the holder to priority review by the FDA of another drug of the bearer’s choice.  The Vouchers are transferable, i.e., not limited to use by the company that gained approval of the neglected-disease drug.  

Professor Ben Martin (Science and Technology Policy Studies at SPRU, University of Sussex) defines science policy research as ‘economic, policy, management and organisational studies of science, technology and innovation (STI) with a view to providing useful inputs to decision-makers concerned with policies for and the management of STI’.  The field is important because STI is important: it is a source of progress, a major contributor to the wealth of nations, provides the basis for new goods and services and for new capabilities, and contributes to changes in the quality of life and t

Summarised in this publication are the main points and conclusions from a discussion facilitated by OHE that focused on innovation in the pharmaceutical industry. Participants included representatives of the pharmaceutical industry, health technology assessment bodies and academic economists.

The purpose of the conference was to locate and promote the role of health economics in mental health policy in low and middle income countries. Health economists have a growing voice in health policy development. But just as it is only recently that mental health policy specifically has been highlighted on the global stage, with the WHO’s 2001 World Health Report, so too has the economics of mental health only comparatively recently started to claim attention on the global policy stage.