Quotations of the Day: ISPOR Edition

As heard at ISPOR 2023 in Boston: On high US drug prices: “My hope as a European is that US never gets its health system in order.” And his Yoda-like pronouncement: “Affordability is important; but value is critical” Michael Drummond HT: Peter Neumann. See also Dr. Neumann’s ISPOR recap thread

Improving Care for Older Adults with Cancer

Cancer is a horrible disease. Providing high quality care often means providing safe, effective and cost-effective treatments that meets a patient’s priority. Reaching these goals, however, is particularly challenging when treating older adults with cancer. A paper on this exact topic by Ramsdale et al. (2017) notes that: Cancer care delivery for older adults with…

What Do Value Assessments Miss?

To find out the answer to this question, check out a live webinar on Wednesday, March 13th at 1:30pm EDT led by Dr. Anupam Jena, MD, PhD. Dr. Jena is a Harvard Professor and Precision Health Economics Scientific Advisor. In this unique one-hour webinar, Dr. Jena will outline a broader framework for assessing value to improve identification of not…

Congress grills pharma executives

Seven CEOs from large pharmaceutical firms were brought before Congress today. And they got an earful from both Demogratic and Republican Congressmen. The executives were critique for selling too many opioids. They were critiqued for legal manuevers to extend brand name drugs’ patent life. But most of all, they were critiqued for high drug prices.…

To get our money’s worth in healthcare, we need to collaborate

This is the title of an interesting commentary in Modern Healthcare by my colleague Mark Linthicum. An excerpt is below. In healthcare, different stakeholders have vastly different perceptions of value, with important implications for decisionmaking. An employer paying for healthcare may want to find solutions that decrease employee absences and prevent lengthy hospitalizations. A health…

What does “value” really mean?

An interesting article in Stat makes the important point that although there is much talk about “value” in the media and health policy world, the exact definition of “value” depends on your presepective. But a survey released Wednesday by the University of Utah shows that, in health care, value has no universal meaning — 88 percent of doctors…