Every Monday our authors provide a round-up of some of the most recently published peer reviewed articles from the field. We don’t cover everything, or even what’s most important – just a few papers that have interested the author. Visit our Resources page for links to more journals or follow the HealthEconBot. If you’d like to write one of our weekly journal round-ups, get in touch.
Economically efficient hepatitis C virus treatment prioritization improves health outcomes. Medical Decision Making [PubMed] Published 22th August 2018
Hepatitis C treatment was in the news a couple of years ago when the new direct-acting antivirals first appeared on the scene. These drugs are very effective but also incredibly expensive. This prompted a flurry of cost-effectiveness analyses and discussions of the role of affordability in cost-effectiveness (my views here).
This compelling study by Lauren Cipriano and colleagues joins the debate by comparing various strategies to prioritise patients for treatment when the budget is not enough to meet patient demand. This is a clear example of the health losses due to the opportunity cost.
The authors compare the costs and health outcomes of various prioritisation schedules in terms of the number of patients treated, the distribution by severity and age, time to treatment, impact on end-stage liver disease, QALYs, costs and net benefit.
The differences between prioritisation schedules in terms of these various outcomes were remarkable. Reassuringly, the optimal prioritisation schedule on the basis of net benefit (the “optimisation” schedule) was the one that achieved the most QALYs and the greatest net benefit. This was even though the cost-effectiveness threshold did not reflect the opportunity cost, as it was set at $100,000 per QALY gained.
This study is fascinating. It shows how the optimal policy depends on what we are trying to maximise. The “first come first serve” schedule treats the most patients, but it is the “optimisation” schedule that achieves the most health benefits net of the opportunity cost.
Since their purpose was not to compare treatments, the authors used a representative price depending on whether patients had progressed to cirrhosis. A future study could include a comparison between drugs, as our previous work found that there are clear differences in cost-effectiveness between treatment strategies. The more cost-effective the treatment strategies, the more patients can be treated with a given budget.
The authors made the Excel model available as supporting material, together with documentation. This is excellent practice! It disseminates the work and shows openness to independent validation. Well done!
Long-term survival and value of chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy for pediatric patients with relapsed or refractory leukemia. JAMA Pediatrics [PubMed] Published 8th October 2018
This fascinating study looks at the cost-effectiveness of tisagenlecleucel in the treatment of children with relapsed or refractory leukaemia compared to chemotherapy.
Tisagenlecleucel is the first chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CAR-T) therapy. CAR-T therapy is the new kid on the block in cancer treatment. It involves modifying the patient’s own immune system cells to recognise and kill the patient’s cancer (see here for details). Such high-tech treatment comes with a hefty price tag. Tisagenlecleucel is listed at $475,000 for a one-off administration.
The key challenge was to obtain the effectiveness inputs under the chemotherapy option. This was because tisagenlecleucel has only been studied in single-arm trials and individual level data was not available to the research team. The research team selected a single-arm study on the outcomes with clofarabine monotherapy, since its patients at baseline were most similar in terms of demographics and number of prior therapies to the tisagenlecleucel study.
This study is brilliant in approaching a difficult decision problem and conducting extensive sensitivity analysis. In particular, it tests the impact of common drivers of the cost-effectiveness of potentially curative therapies in children, such as the discount rate, duration of benefit, treatment initiation, and the inclusion of future health care costs. Ideally, the sensitivity analysis should also have tested the assumption that the studies informing the effectiveness inputs for tisagenlecleucel and clofarabine monotherapy were comparable or if clofarabine monotherapy does not represent the current standard of care, although it would be difficult to parameterise.
This outstanding study highlights the challenges posed by the approval of treatments based on single-arm studies. Had individual-level data been available, an adjusted comparison may have been possible, which would improve the degree of confidence in the cost-effectiveness of tisagenlecleucel. Regulators and trial sponsors should work together to make anonymised individual level data available to bonafide researchers.
Researcher requests for inappropriate analysis and reporting: a U.S. survey of consulting biostatisticians. Annals of Internal Medicine [PubMed] Published 10th October 2018
This study reports a survey of biostatisticians on the frequency and severity of requests for inappropriate analysis and reporting. The results are stunning!
The top 3 requests in terms of severity were to falsify statistical significance to support a desired result, change data to achieve the desired outcome and remove/alter data records to better support the research hypothesis. Fortunately, this sort of requests appears to be rare.
The top 3 requests in terms of frequency seem to be not showing a plot because it does not show an effect as strong as it had been hoped; to stress only the significant findings but under-reporting non-significant ones, and report results before data have been cleaned and validated.
Given the frequency and severity of the requests, the authors recommend that researchers should be better educated in good statistical practice and research ethics. I couldn’t agree more and would suggest that cost-effectiveness analysis is included, given that it informs policy decisions and it is generally conducted by multidisciplinary teams.
I’m now wondering what the responses would be if we did a similar survey to health economists, particularly those working in health technology assessment! Something for HESG, iHEA or ISPOR to look at for the future?
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