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Meeting round-up: iHEA Congress 2019

Rita Faria Leave a comment

Missed iHEA 2019? Or were you there but could not make it to all of the amazing sessions? Stay tuned for my conference highlights!

iHEA started on Saturday 13th with pre-congress sessions on fascinating research as well as more prosaic topics, such as early-career networking sessions with senior health economists. All attendees got a super useful plastic bottle – great idea iHEA team!

The conference proper launched on Sunday evening with the brilliant plenary session by Raj Chetty from Harvard University.

Monday morning started bright and early with the thought-provoking session on validation of CE models. It was chaired and discussed by Stefan Lhachimi and featured presentations by Isaac Corro Ramos, Talitha Feenstra and Salah Ghabri. I’m pleased to see that validation is coming to the forefront of current topics! Clearly, we need to do better in validating our models and documenting code, but we’re on the right track and engaged in making this happen.

Next up, the superb session on the societal perspective for cost-effectiveness analysis. It was an all-star cast with Mark Sculpher, Simon Walker, Susan Griffin, Peter Neumann, Lisa Robinson, and Werner Brouwer. I’ve live-tweeted it here.

The case was expertly made that taking a single sector perspective can be misleading when evaluating policies with cross-sectoral effects, hence the impact inventory by Simon and colleagues is a useful tool to guide the choice of sectors to include. At the same time, we should be mindful of the requirements of the decision-maker for whom CEA is intended. This was a compelling session, which will definitely set the scene for much more research to come.

After a tasty lunch (well done catering team!), I headed to the session on evaluations using non-randomised data. The presenters included Maninie Molatseli, Fernando Antonio Postali, James Love-Koh and Taufik Hidayat, on case studies from South Africa, Brazil and Indonesia. Marc Suhrcke chaired. I really enjoyed hearing about the practicalities of applying econometric methods to estimate treatment effects of system wide policies. And James’s presentation was a great application of distributional cost-effectiveness analysis.

I was on the presenter’s chair next, discussing the challenges in implementing policies in the southwest quadrant of the CE plane. This session was chaired by Anna Vassall and discussed by Gesine Meyer-Rath. Jack Dowie started by convincingly arguing that the decision rule should be the same regardless of where in the CE plane the policy falls. David Bath and Sergio Torres-Rueda presented fascinating case studies of south west policies. And I argued that the barrier was essentially a problem of communication (presentation available here). An energetic discussion followed and showed that, even in our field, the matter is far from settled.

The day finished with the memorial session for the wonderful Alan Maynard and Uwe Reinhardt, both of whom did so much for health economics. It was a beautiful session, where people got together to share incredible stories from these health economics heroes. And if you’d like to know more, both Alan and Uwe have published books here and here.

Tuesday started with the session on precision medicine, chaired by Dean Regier, and featuring Rosalie Viney, Chris McCabe and Stuart Peacock. Rather than slides, the screen was filled with a video of a cosy fireplace, inviting the audience to take part in the discussion.

Under debate was whether precision medicine is a completely different type of technology, with added benefits over and above improvement to health, and needing a different CE framework. The panellists were absolutely outstanding in debating the issues! Although I understand the benefits beyond health that these technologies can offer, I side with the view that, like with other technologies, value is about whether the added benefits are worth the losses given the opportunity cost.

My final session of the day was by the great Mike Drummond, comparing how HTA has influenced the uptake of new anticancer drugs in Spain versus England (summary in thread below). Mike and colleagues found that positive recommendations do increase utilisation, but the magnitude of change differs by country and region. The work is ongoing in checking that utilisation has been picked up accurately in the routine data sources.

The conference dinner was at the Markthalle, with plenty of drinks and loads of international food to choose from. I had to have an early night given that I was presenting at 8:30 the next morning. Others, though, enjoyed the party until the early hours!

Indeed, Wednesday started with my session on cost-effectiveness analysis of diagnostic tests. Alison Smith presented on her remarkable work on measurement uncertainty while Hayley Jones gave a masterclass on her new method for meta-analysis of test accuracy across multiple thresholds. I presented on the CEA of test sequences (available here). Simon Walker and James Buchanan added insightful points as discussants. We had a fantastically engaged audience, with great questions and comments. It shows that the CEA of diagnostic tests is becoming a hugely important topic.

Sadly, some other morning sessions were not as well attended. One session, also on CEA, was even cancelled due to lack of audience! For future conferences, I’d suggest scheduling the sessions on the day after the conference dinner a bit later, as well as having fewer sessions to choose from.

Next up on my agenda was the exceptional session on equity, chaired by Paula Lorgelly, and with presentations by Richard Cookson, Susan Griffin and Ijeoma Edoka. I was unable to attend, but I have watched it at home via YouTube (from 1:57:10)! That’s right, some sessions were live streamed and are still available via the iHEA website. Do have a look!

My last session of the conference was on end-of-life care, with Charles Normand chairing, discussed by Helen Mason, Eric Finkelstein, and Mendwas Dzingina, and presentations by Koonal Shah, Bridget Johnson and Nikki McCaffrey. It was a really thought-provoking session, raising questions on the value of interventions at the end-of-life compared to at other stages of the life course.

Lastly, the outstanding plenary session by Lise Rochaix and Joseph Kutzin on how to translate health economics research into policy. Lise and Joseph had pragmatic suggestions and insightful comments on the communication of health economics research to policy makers. Superb! Also available on the live stream here (from 06:09:44).

iHEA 2019 was truly an amazing conference. Expertly organised, well thought-out and with lots of interesting sessions to choose from. iHEA 2021 in Cape Town is firmly in my diary!

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!

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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.

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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.

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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!