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.
Stratified treatment recommendation or one-size-fits-all? A health economic insight based on graphical exploration. The European Journal of Health Economics [PubMed] Published 29th October 2018
Health care is increasingly personalised. This creates the need to evaluate interventions for smaller and smaller subgroups as patient heterogeneity is taken into account. And this usually means we lack the statistical power to have confidence in our findings. The purpose of this paper is to consider the usefulness of a tool that hasn’t previously been employed in economic evaluation – the subpopulation treatment effect pattern plot (STEPP). STEPP works by assessing the interaction between treatments and covariates in different subgroups, which can then be presented graphically. Imagine your X-axis with the values defining the subgroups and your Y-axis showing the treatment outcome. This information can then be used to determine which subgroups exhibit positive outcomes.
This study uses data from a trial-based economic evaluation in heart failure, where patients’ 18-month all-cause mortality risk was estimated at baseline before allocation to one of three treatment strategies. For the STEPP procedure, the authors use baseline risk to define subgroups and adopt net monetary benefit at the patient level as the outcome. The study makes two comparisons (between three alternative strategies) and therefore presents two STEPP figures. The STEPP figures are used to identify subgroups, which the authors apply in a stratified cost-effectiveness analysis, estimating net benefit in each defined risk subgroup.
Interpretation of the STEPPs is a bit loose, with no hard decision rules. The authors suggest that one of the STEPPs shows no clear relationship between net benefit and baseline risk in terms of the cost-effectiveness of the intervention (care as usual vs basic support). The other STEPP shows that, on average, people with baseline risk below 0.16 have a positive net benefit from the intervention (intensive support vs basic support), while those with higher risk do not. The authors evaluate this stratification strategy against an alternative stratification strategy (based on the patient’s New York Heart Association class) and find that the STEPP-based approach is expected to be more cost-effective. So the key message seems to be that STEPP can be used as a basis for defining subgroups as cost-effectively as possible.
I’m unsure about the extent to which this is a method that deserves to have its own name, insofar as it is used in this study. I’ve seen plenty of studies present a graph with net benefit on the Y-axis and some patient characteristic on the X-axis. But my main concern is about defining subgroups on the basis of net monetary benefit rather than some patient characteristic. Is it OK to deny treatment to subgroup A because treatment costs are higher than in subgroup B, even if treatment is cost-effective for the entire population of A+B? Maybe, but I think that creates more challenges than stratification on the basis of treatment outcome.
Using post-market utilisation analysis to support medicines pricing policy: an Australian case study of aflibercept and ranibizumab use. Applied Health Economics and Health Policy [PubMed] Published 25th October 2018
The use of ranibizumab and aflibercept has been a hot topic in the UK, where NHS providers feel that they’ve been bureaucratically strong-armed into using an incredibly expensive drug to treat certain eye conditions when a cheaper and just-as-effective alternative is available. Seeing how other countries have managed prices in this context could, therefore, be valuable to the NHS and other health services internationally. This study uses data from Australia, where decisions about subsidising medicines are informed by research into how drugs are used after they come to market. Both ranibizumab (in 2007) and aflibercept (in 2012) were supported for the treatment of age-related macular degeneration. These decisions were based on clinical trials and modelling studies, which also showed that the benefit of ~6 aflibercept prescriptions equated to the benefit of ~12 ranibizumab prescriptions, justifying a higher price-per-injection for aflibercept.
In the UK and US, aflibercept attracts a higher price. The authors assume that this is because of the aforementioned trial data relating to the number of doses. However, in Australia, the same price is paid for aflibercept and ranibizumab. This is because a post-market analysis showed that, in practice, ranibizumab and aflibercept had a similar dose frequency. The purpose of this study is to see whether this is because different groups of patients are being prescribed the two drugs. If they are, then we might anticipate heterogenous treatment outcomes and thus a justification for differential pricing. Data were drawn from an administrative claims database for 208,000 Australian veterans for 2007-2017. The monthly number of aflibercept and ranibizumab prescriptions was estimated for each person, showing that total prescriptions increased steadily over the period, with aflibercept taking around half the market within a year of its approval. Ranibizumab initiators were slightly older in the post-aflibercept era but, aside from that, there were no real differences identified. When it comes to the prescription of ranibizumab or aflibercept, gender, being in residential care, remoteness of location, and co-morbidities don’t seem to be important. Dispensing rates were similar, at around 3 prescriptions during the first 90 days and around 9 prescriptions during the following 12 months.
The findings seem to support Australia’s decision to treat ranibizumab and aflibercept as substitutes at the same price. More generally, they support the idea that post-market utilisation assessments can (and perhaps should) be used as part of the health technology assessment and reimbursement process.
Do political factors influence public health expenditures? Evidence pre- and post-great recession. The European Journal of Health Economics [PubMed] Published 24th October 2018
There is mixed evidence about the importance of partisanship in public spending, and very little relating specifically to health care. I’d be worried if political factors didn’t influence public spending on health, given that that’s a definitively political issue. How the situation might be different before and after a recession is an interesting question.
The authors combined OECD data for 34 countries from 1970-2016 with the Database of Political Institutions. This allowed for the creation of variables relating to the ideology of the government and the proximity of elections. Stationary panel data models were identified as the most appropriate method for analysis of these data. A variety of political factors were included in the models, for which the authors present marginal effects. The more left-wing a government, the higher is public spending on health care, but this is only statistically significant in the period before the crisis of 2007. Before the crisis, coalition governments tended to spend more, while governments with more years in office tended to spend less. These effects also seem to disappear after 2007. Throughout the whole period, governing parties with a stronger majority tended to spend less on health care. Several of the non-political factors included in the models show the results that we would expect. GDP per capita is positively associated with health care expenditures, for example. The findings relating to the importance of political factors appear to be robust to the inclusion of other (non-political) variables and there are similar findings when the authors look at public health expenditure as a percentage of total health expenditure. In contradiction with some previous studies, proximity to elections does not appear to be important.
The most interesting finding here is that the effect of partisanship seems to have mostly disappeared – or, at least, reduced – since the crisis of 2007. Why did left-wing parties and right-wing parties converge? The authors suggest that it’s because adverse economic circumstances restrict the extent to which governments can make decisions on the basis of ideology. Though I dare say readers of this blog could come up with plenty of other (perhaps non-economic) explanations.
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