Page 2 of 120

Meeting round-up: ISPOR Europe 2018 (part 2)

Rita Faria Leave a comment

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.

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!

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.

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.

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!

poster_hall

Meeting round-up: ISPOR Europe 2018 (part 1)

Rita Faria 2 Comments

ISPOR Europe 2018, which took place in Barcelona on the 10th-14th November, was an exceptional conference. It had a jam-packed programme on the latest developments and most pressing challenges in health technology assessment (HTA), economic evaluation and outcomes research. In two blog posts, I’ll tell you about the outstanding sessions and thought-provoking discussions in this always superb conference.

For me, proceedings started on Sunday, with the excellent short-course Adjusting for Time-Dependent Confounding and Treatment Switching Bias in Observational Studies and Clinical Trials: Purpose, Methods, Good Practices and Acceptance in HTA, by Uwe Siebert, Felicitas Kühne and Nick Latimer. Felicitas Kühne explained that causal inference methods aim to estimate the effect of a treatment, risk factor etc. on our outcome of interest, controlling for other exposures that may affect it and hence bias our estimate. Uwe Siebert and Nick Latimer provided a really useful overview of the methods to overcome this challenge in observational studies and RCTs with treatment switching. This was an absolutely brilliant course. Highly recommended to any health economist!

ISPOR conferences usually start early and finish late with loads of exceptional sessions. On Monday, I started the conference proper with the plenary Joint Assessment of Relative Effectiveness: “Trick or Treat” for Decision Makers in EU Member States, moderated by Finn Børlum Kristensen. There were presentations from representatives of payers, HTA agencies, EUnetHTA, pharmaceutical industry and patients. The prevailing mood seemed to be of cautious anticipation. Avoiding duplication of efforts in the clinical assessment was greatly welcomed, but there were some concerns voiced about the practicalities of implementation. The proposal was due to be discussed soon by the European Commission, so undoubtedly we can look forward to knowing more in the near future.

plenary1

My next session was the fascinating panel on the perils and opportunities of advanced computing techniques with the tongue-in-cheek title Will machines soon make health economists obsolete?, by David Thompson, Bill Marder, Gerry Oster and Mike Drummond. Don’t panic yet as, despite the promises of artificial intelligence, I’d wager that our jobs are quite safe. For example, Gerry Oster predicted that demand for health economic models is actually likely to increase, as computers make our models quicker and cheaper to build. Mike Drummond finished with the sensible suggestion to simply keep calm and carry on modelling, as computing advances will liberate our time to explore other areas, such as the interface with decision-makers. This session left us all in a very positive mood as we headed for a well-earned lunch!

There were many interesting sessions in the afternoon. I chose to pop over to the ISPOR Medical Device and Diagnostic Special Interest Group Open Meeting, the ISPOR Portugal chapter meeting, along with taking in the podium presentations on conceptual papers. Many of the presentations will be made available in the ISPOR database, which I recommend exploring. I had a wonderful experience moderating the engaging podium session on cancer models, with outstanding presentations delivered by Hedwig Blommestein, Ash Bullement, and Isle van Oostrum.

The workshop Adjusting for post-randomisation confounding and switching in phase 3 and pragmatic trials to get the estimands right: needs, methods, sub-optimal use, and acceptance in HTA by Uwe Siebert, Felicitas Kühne, Nick Latimer and Amanda Adler is one worth highlighting. The panellists showed that some HTAs do not include any adjustments for treatment switching, whilst adjustments can sometimes be incorrectly applied. It reinforced the idea that we need to learn more about these methods, to be able to apply them in practice and critically appraise them.

The afternoon finished with the second session of the day on posters. Alessandro Grosso, Laura Bojke and I had a poster on the impact of structural uncertainty in the expected value of perfect information. Alessandro did an amazing job encapsulating the poster and presenting it live to camera, which you can watch here.

poster_photo

In tomorrow’s blog post, I’ll tell you about day 2 of ISPOR Europe 2018 in Barcelona. Tuesday was another big day, with loads of outstanding sessions on the key topics in HTA. It featured my very own workshop, with Rob Hettle, Gabriel Rogers and Mike Drummond on communicating cost-effectiveness analysis. I hope you will stay tuned for the ISPOR meeting round-up part 2!

Chris Sampson’s journal round-up for 19th November 2018

Chris Sampson Leave a comment

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.

Valuation of health states considered to be worse than death—an analysis of composite time trade-off data from 5 EQ-5D-5L valuation studies. Value in Health Published 12th November 2018

I have a problem with the idea of health states being ‘worse than dead’, and I’ve banged on about it on this blog. Happily, this new article provides an opportunity for me to continue my campaign. Health state valuation methods estimate how much a person prefers being in a more healthy state. Positive values are easy to understand; 1.0 is twice as good as 0.5. But how about the negative values? Is -1.0 twice as bad as -0.5? How much worse than being dead is that? The purpose of this study is to evaluate whether or not negative EQ-5D-5L values meaningfully discriminate between different health states.

The study uses data from EQ-5D-5L valuation studies conducted in Singapore, the Netherlands, China, Thailand, and Canada. Altogether, more than 5000 people provided valuations of 10 states each. As a simple measure of severity, the authors summed the number of steps from full health in all domains, giving a value from 0 (11111) to 20 (55555). We’d expect this measure of severity of states to correlate strongly with the mean utility values derived from the composite time trade-off (TTO) exercise.

Taking Singapore as an example, the mean of positive values (states better than dead) decreased from 0.89 to 0.21 with increasing severity, which is reassuring. The mean of negative values, on the other hand, ranged from -0.98 to -0.89. Negative values were clustered between -0.5 and -1.0. Results were similar across the other countries. In all except Thailand, observed negative values were indistinguishable from random noise. There was no decreasing trend in mean utility values as severity increased for states worse than dead. A linear mixed model with participant-specific intercepts and an ANOVA model confirmed the findings.

What this means is that we can’t say much about states worse than dead except that they are worse than dead. How much worse doesn’t relate to severity, which is worrying if we’re using these values in trade-offs against states better than dead. Mostly, the authors frame this lack of discriminative ability as a practical problem, rather than anything more fundamental. The discussion section provides some interesting speculation, but my favourite part of the paper is an analogy, which I’ll be quoting in future: “it might be worse to be lost at sea in deep waters than in a pond, but not in any way that truly matters”. Dead is dead is dead.

Determining value in health technology assessment: stay the course or tack away? PharmacoEconomics [PubMed] Published 9th November 2018

The cost-per-QALY approach to value in health care is no stranger to assault. The majority of criticisms are ill-founded special pleading, but, sometimes, reasonable tweaks and alternatives have been proposed. The aim of this paper was to bring together a supergroup of health economists to review and discuss these reasonable alternatives. Specifically, the questions they sought to address were: i) what should health technology assessment achieve, and ii) what should be the approach to value-based pricing?

The paper provides an unstructured overview of a selection of possible adjustments or alternatives to the cost-per-QALY method. We’re very briefly introduced to QALY weighting, efficiency frontiers, and multi-criteria decision analysis. The authors don’t tell us why we ought (or ought not) to adopt these alternatives. I was hoping that the paper would provide tentative answers to the normative questions posed, but it doesn’t do that. It doesn’t even outline the thought processes required to answer them.

The purpose of this paper seems to be to argue that alternative approaches aren’t sufficiently developed to replace the cost-per-QALY approach. But it’s hardly a strong defence. I’m a big fan of the cost-per-QALY as a necessary (if not sufficient) part of decision making in health care, and I agree with the authors that the alternatives are lacking in support. But the lack of conviction in this paper scares me. It’s tempting to make a comparison between the EU and the QALY.

How can we evaluate the cost-effectiveness of health system strengthening? A typology and illustrations. Social Science & Medicine [PubMed] Published 3rd November 2018

Health care is more than the sum of its parts. This is particularly evident in low- and middle-income countries that might lack strong health systems and which therefore can’t benefit from a new intervention in the way a strong system could. Thus, there is value in health system strengthening. But, as the authors of this paper point out, this value can be difficult to identify. The purpose of this study is to provide new methods to model the impact of health system strengthening in order to support investment decisions in this context.

The authors introduce standard cost-effectiveness analysis and economies of scope as relevant pieces of the puzzle. In essence, this paper is trying to marry the two. An intervention is more likely to be cost-effective if it helps to provide economies of scope, either by making use of an underused platform or providing a new platform that would improve the cost-effectiveness of other interventions. The authors provide a typology with three types of health system strengthening: i) investing in platform efficiency, ii) investing in platform capacity, and iii) investing in new platforms. Examples are provided for each. Simple mathematical approaches to evaluating these are described, using scaling factors and disaggregated cost and outcome constraints. Numerical demonstrations show how these approaches can reveal differences in cost-effectiveness that arise through changes in technical efficiency or the opportunity cost linked to health system strengthening.

This paper is written with international development investment decisions in mind, and in particular the challenge of investments that can mostly be characterised as health system strengthening. But it’s easy to see how many – perhaps all – health services are interdependent. If anything, the broader impact of new interventions on health systems should be considered as standard. The methods described in this paper provide a useful framework to tackle these issues, with food for thought for anybody engaged in cost-effectiveness analysis.

Credits