Have you missed ISPOR Europe 2018 but are eager to know all about it? Time to continue reading! In yesterday’s post, I wrote about ISPOR’s outstanding short-course on causal inference and the superb sessions I had attended on day 1. This blog post is about day 2, Tuesday 13th, which was another big day.
The second plenary session was on fairness in pharmaceutical pricing. It was moderated by Sarah Garner, with presentations by many key stakeholders. The thought-provoking discussion highlighted the importance of pharmaceutical pricing policy and the large role that HTA can have in shaping it.
Communicating cost-effectiveness analysis was the next session, where myself, together with Rob Hettle, Gabriel Rogers and Mike Drummond, discussed the pitfalls and approaches to explaining cost-effectiveness models to non-health economists. This was a hugely popular session! We were delighted by the incredibly positive feedback we received, which reassured us that we are clearly not alone in finding it difficult to communicate cost-effectiveness analysis to a lay audience. We certainly feel incentivised to continue working on this topic. The slides are available here, and for the audience’s feedback, search on twitter #communicateCEA.
Coming up at 11am at #ISPORBarcelona: How to #communicateCEA to a lay audience, room 117. With Mike Drummond, @hettle14 , Gabriel Rogers & myself 😀 pic.twitter.com/dNSXBuXDHu
— Rita Faria (@RitaINdeFaria) November 13, 2018
The lunch was followed by the open meeting of ISPOR Women in HEOR Initiative with Shelby Reed, Olivia Wu and Louise Timlin. It is really encouraging to see ISPOR taking a proactive stance to gender balance!
In #ISPORBarcelona P112 Women in HEOR: Olivia Wu, Louise Tomlin, and Shelby D. Reed, discuss the gender gap in HEOR and what we can do about it. Some ideas in the slide with some solutions 👏 pic.twitter.com/1bYfkGLQWS
— Rita Faria (@RitaINdeFaria) November 13, 2018
The most popular session in the afternoon was Valuing a cure: Are new approaches needed, with Steve Pearson, Jens Grueger, Sarah Garner and Mark Sculpher. The panel showed the various perspectives on the pricing of curative therapies. Payers call for a sustainable pricing model, whilst pharma warns that pricing policy is necessarily linked to the incentives for investment in research. I agree with Mark in that these challenges are not unique to curative therapies. As pharmaceutical therapies have greater health benefits but at large costs, it is pressing that cost-effectiveness assessments are also able to consider the opportunity cost of funding more costly treatments. See here for a roundup of the estimates already available.
Are new approaches needed to value a cure? Panel now in #ISPORBarcelona room 115 pic.twitter.com/Q72QBEhqCi
— Rita Faria (@RitaINdeFaria) November 13, 2018
I then attended the excellent session on Drug disinvestment: is it needed and how could it work, moderated by Richard Macaulay. Andrew Walker explained that HTA agencies’ advice does not always go down well with local payers, highlighting this with an amusing imaginary dialogue between NICE and a hospital. Detlev Parow argued that payers find that prices are often unaffordable, hence payment schemes should consider other options, such as treatment success, risk-sharing agreements and payment by instalments. Bettina Ryll made an impressive case from the patients’ perspective, for whom these decisions have a real impact.
Andrew Walker in #ISPORBarcelona on disinvestment IP18 room 113:
How do local layers view the HTA agency advice? Not necessarily bin the most positive way.
Well intentioned initiatives can have unintended consequences… and NICE are actually nice… Comparatively at least! pic.twitter.com/wPNfc2D5e1— Rita Faria (@RitaINdeFaria) November 13, 2018
The conference continued late into the evening and, I suspect, long into the early hours of Wednesday, with the ever-popular conference dinner. Wednesday was another day full of fascinating sessions. The plenary was titled Budget Impact and Expenditure Caps: Potential or Pitfall, moderated by Guillem López-Casasnovas. It was followed by inspiring sessions that explored a wide range of topics, presented by the top experts in the relevant fields. These really delved into the nitty-gritty on subjects, such as using R to build decision models, the value of diagnostic information, and expert elicitation, just to name a few.
I don’t think I’m just speaking personally when I say that ISPOR Barcelona was an absolutely brilliant conference! I’ve mentioned here a few of the most outstanding sessions, but there were many, many more. There were so many sessions at the same time that it was physically impossible to attend all of those with a direct relevance to my research. But fortunately, we can access all the presentations by downloading them from the ISPOR website. I’ll leave the suggestion to ISPOR here, that they should think about filming some of the key sessions and broadcasting them as webinars after the conference. This could create a further key resource for our sector.
As in previous editions, ISPOR Barcelona truly confirms ISPOR Europe in the top HTA conferences in Europe, if not the world. It expertly combines cutting-edge methodological research with outstanding applied work, all with the view to better inform decision making. As I’m sure you can guess, I’m already looking forward to the next ISPOR Europe in Copenhagen on the 2nd-6th November 2019, and the amazing sessions which will indubitably be featured!
