OHE Publications

OHE releases a number of publications throughout the year, authored by OHE team members and/or outside experts. All are free for download as pdf files; hard copies of some publications are available upon request.

A description of the OHE publications categories.

 

Can and Should Value Based Pricing Be Applied to Molecular Diagnostics?

Garau, M., Towse, A., Garrison, L., Housman, L. and Ossa, D.

Research Paper
April 2012

Diagnostics not only facilitate health gain and cost savings, but also provide information to inform patients’ decisions on interventions and to clarify how their behaviour may affect their health. Current pricing and reimbursement systems for diagnostics, however, are not efficient and provide poor incentives for new diagnostic approaches.  Prices often are driven by administrative practice and expected production cost, rather than assessments of value.

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The Tougher the Better: The Effect of an Increased Performance Threshold on the Performance of General Practitioners

Feng, Y., May, A., Farrar, S. and Sutton, M.

Research Paper
April 2012

In April 2006, payment thresholds were raised for GPs who participate in Scotland’s Ouality and Outcomes Framework.  GPs were required to meet new, higher thresholds on some indicators to receive maximum levels of payment.  In this paper, OHE’s Yan Feng and her colleagues examine whether this change in fact improved GP performance and whether the impact differed across GPs. Specifically, they examine whether low-, mid- and high-performing GPs changed behaviour and, if so, to what extent.

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Assessing the Performance of the EQ-VAS in the NHS PROMs Programme

Feng, Y., Parkin, D. and Devlin, N.

Research Paper
April 2012

The NHS Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) programme, introduced in April 2009, is a significant development in the routine collection and use of patient reported outcome data.  Data currently are collected for patients both before and after surgery for four elective surgical procedures in the NHS, with plans to expand the practice.

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The Use of Pay-for-Performance for Drugs: Can It Improve Incentives for Innovation?

Towse, A., Garrison, L. and Puig-Peiro, R.

Occasional Paper
February 2012

Interest is growing in schemes that involve “paying for pills by results”, that is, “paying for performance” rather than merely “paying for pills”.  Despite its intuitive appeal, this approach is highly controversial and is disliked by many health care providers, policy makers, and pharmaceutical companies.

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Report of the Office of Health Economics Commission on Competition in the NHS

OHE Commission

Monograph
January 2012

This report is based on the deliberations of the OHE Commission on Competition that was assembled in early 2011 "to consider the circumstances where competition between providers of health care might be both feasible and expected to yield benefits, and where not."

The members of the Commission possessed experience and expertise in competition/regulation economics, NHS economics, health policy, NHS management, and health care provision. Their views on competition in the NHS were divergent, meaning that the conclusions the Commission would reach were far from predetermined.

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Time Trends in NICE HTA Decisions

O'Neill, P., Devlin, N. and Puig-Peiro, R.

Consulting Report
January 2012

According to the 1999 UK Department of Health consultation document, the fundamental purpose of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) was to reduce inequalities in access to innovative care and ensure more rapid access to medicines identified as being of value to the NHS. Since NICE’s debut in April 1999, several analyses have examined the uptake of technologies that have been considered by NICE, but no evidence has yet been published on whether and how NICE’s health technology appraisal (HTA) processes may have affected the speed of access to new treatments.

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Critical Review of the Quality and Competition Measures and Identification Strategies Used in Health Care Studies

Mordoh, A.

Occasional Paper
December 2011

Prepared as background for the OHE Commission on Competition, this paper provides an overview of the published literature detailing the links between quality and competition in health care systems.  It finds that most empirical research to date has focused on aspects of competition and quality in the hospital sector, rather than GP/outpatient care.

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Valuing Health at the End of Life: An Exploratory Preference Elicitation Study

Shah, K., Tsuchiya, A. and Wailoo, A.

Research Paper
December 2011

In 2009, the UK’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) issued supplementary advice that its Appraisal Committees are to consider when assessing treatments that extend life at the end of life.  This includes an option for approving such treatments for use in the NHS if certain criteria are met, even if base case cost-effectiveness estimates exceed the range usually considered acceptable.

 

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Willingness to Pay and Publicly Funded Health Care: Contradiction in Terms?

Donaldson, C.

Seminar Briefing
November 2011

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

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Summary Report of the OHE/EFPIA Antibacterial Roundtable

Sharma, P.

Seminar Briefing
November 2011

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.

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