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.
Evaluation of intervention impact on health inequality for resource allocation. Medical Decision Making [PubMed] Published 28th February 2019
How should decision-makers factor equity impacts into economic decisions? Can we trade off an intervention’s cost-effectiveness with its impact on unfair health inequalities? Is a QALY just a QALY or should we weight it more if it is gained by someone from a disadvantaged group? Can we assume that, because people of lower socioeconomic position lose more QALYs through ill health, that most interventions should, by default, reduce inequalities?
I really like the health equity plane. This is where you show health impacts (usually including a summary measure of cost-effectiveness like net health benefit or net monetary benefit) and equity impacts (which might be a change in slope index of inequality [SII] or relative index of inequality) on the same plane. This enables decision-makers to identify potential trade-offs between interventions that produce a greater benefit, but have less impact on inequalities, and those that produce a smaller benefit, but increase equity. I think there has been a debate over whether the ‘win-win’ quadrant should be south-east (which would be consistent with the dominant quadrant of the cost-effectiveness plane) or north-east, which is what seems to have been adopted as the consensus and is used here.
This paper showcases a reproducible method to estimate the equity impact of interventions. It considers public health interventions recommended by NICE from 2006-2016, with equity impacts estimated based on whether they targeted specific diseases, risk factors or populations. The disease distributions were based on hospital episode statistics data by deprivation (IMD). The study used equity weights to convert QALYs gained to different social groups into net social welfare. In this case, valuing the most disadvantaged fifth of people’s health at around 6-7 times that of the least disadvantaged fifth. I think there might still be work to be done around reaching consensus for equity weights.
The total expected effect on inequalities is small – full implementation of all recommendations would produce a reduction of the quality-adjusted life expectancy gap between the healthiest and least healthy from 13.78 to 13.34 QALYs. But maybe this is to be expected; NICE does not typically look at vaccinations or screening and has not looked at large scale public health programmes like the Healthy Child Programme in the whole. Reassuringly, where recommended interventions were likely to increase inequality, the trade-off between efficiency and equity was within the social welfare function they had used. The increase in inequality might be acceptable because the interventions were cost-effective – producing 5.6million QALYs while increasing the SII by 0.005. If these interventions are buying health at a good price, then you would hope this might then release money for other interventions that would reduce inequalities.
I suspect that public health folks might not like equity trade-offs at all – trading off equity and cost-effectiveness might be the moral equivalent of trading off human rights – you can’t choose between them. But the reality is that these kinds of trade-offs do happen, and like a lot of economic methods, it is about revealing these implicit trade-offs so that they become explicit, and having ‘accountability for reasonableness‘.
Future unrelated medical costs need to be considered in cost effectiveness analysis. The European Journal of Health Economics [PubMed] [RePEc] Published February 2019
This editorial says that NICE should include unrelated future medical costs in its decision making. At the moment, if NICE looks at a cardiovascular disease (CVD) drug, it might look at future costs related to CVD but it won’t include changes in future costs of cancer, or dementia, which may occur because individuals live longer. But usually unrelated QALY gains will be implicitly included; so there is an inconsistency. If you are a health economic modeller, you know that including unrelated costs properly is technically difficult. You might weight average population costs by disease prevalence so you get a cost estimate for people with coronary heart disease, diabetes, and people without either disease. Or you might have a general healthcare running cost that you can apply to future years. But accounting for a full matrix of competing causes of morbidity and mortality is very tricky if not impossible. To help with this, this group of authors produced the excellent PAID tool, which helps with doing this for the Netherlands (can we have one for the UK please?).
To me, including unrelated future costs means that in some cases ICERs might be driven more by the ratio of future costs to QALYs gained. Whereas currently, ICERs are often driven by the ratio of the intervention costs to QALYs gained. So it might be that a lot of treatments that are currently cost-effective no longer are, or we need to judge all interventions with a higher ICER willingness to pay threshold or value of a QALY. The authors suggest that, although including unrelated medical costs usually pushes up the ICER, it should ultimately result in better decisions that increase health.
There are real ethical issues here. I worry that including future unrelated costs might be used for an integrated care agenda in the NHS, moving towards a capitation system where the total healthcare spend on any one individual is capped, which I don’t necessarily think should happen in a health insurance system. Future developments around big data mean we will be able to segment the population a lot better and estimate who will benefit from treatments. But I think if someone is unlucky enough to need a lot of healthcare spending, maybe they should have it. This is risk sharing and, without it, you may get the ‘double jeopardy‘ problem.
For health economic modellers and decision-makers, a compromise might be to present analyses with related and unrelated medical costs and to consider both for investment decisions.
Overview of cost-effectiveness analysis. JAMA [PubMed] Published 11th March 2019
This paper probably won’t offer anything new to academic health economists in terms of methods, but I think it might be a useful teaching resource. It gives an interesting example of a model of ovarian cancer screening in the US that was published in February 2018. There has been a large-scale trial of ovarian cancer screening in the UK (the UKCTOCS), which has been extended because the results have been promising but mortality reductions were not statistically significant. The model gives a central ICER estimate of $106,187/QALY (based on $100 per screen) which would probably not be considered cost-effective in the UK.
I would like to explore one statement that I found particularly interesting, around the willingness to pay threshold; “This willingness to pay is often represented by the largest ICER among all the interventions that were adopted before current resources were exhausted, because adoption of any new intervention would require removal of an existing intervention to free up resources.”
The Culyer bookshelf model is similar to this, although as well as the ICER you also need to consider the burden of disease or size of the investment. Displacing a $110,000/QALY intervention for 1000 people with a $109,000/QALY intervention for a million people will bust your budget.
This idea works intuitively – if Liverpool FC are signing a new player then I might hope they are better than all of the other players, or at least better than the average player. But actually, as long as they are better than the worst player then the team will be improved (leaving aside issues around different positions, how they play together, etc.).
However, I think that saying that the reference ICER should be the largest current ICER might be a bit dangerous. Leaving aside inefficient legacy interventions (like unnecessary tonsillectomies etc), it is likely that the intervention being considered for investment and the current maximum ICER intervention to be displaced may both be new, expensive immunotherapies. It might be last in, first out. But I can’t see this happening; people are loss averse, so decision-makers and patients might not accept what is seen as a fantastic new drug for pancreatic cancer being approved then quickly usurped by a fantastic new leukaemia drug.
There has been a lot of debate around what the threshold should be in the UK; in England NICE currently use £20,000 – £30,000, up to a hypothetical maximum £300,000/QALY in very specific circumstances. UK Treasury value QALYs at £60,000. Work by Karl Claxton and colleagues suggests that marginal productivity (the ‘shadow price’) in the NHS is nearer to £5,000 – £15,000 per QALY.
I don’t know what the answer to this is. I don’t think the willingness-to-pay threshold for a new treatment should be the maximum ICER of a current portfolio of interventions; maybe it should be the marginal health production cost in a health system, as might be inferred from the Claxton work. Of course, investment decisions are made on other factors, like impact on health inequalities, not just on the ICER.
Credits
Neat paper, includes NG64 which I have fond memories of working on! And others where I was on the PHAC.
An interesting (and, I expect, not coincidental) complement to the first paper you covered: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0033350619300356