Melanie D. Whittington, PhD

Pharmaceutical Value (pValue) – headquartered within the University of Colorado’s Anschutz Medical Campus – aims to apply and test novel methods for value assessment that encourage stakeholder engagement and promote value-based decision making. pValue is a recipient of the PhRMA Foundation’s Value Assessment Initiative Centers of Excellence Award. Traditional measures of value used in cost-effectiveness analyses are not, by definition, fully comprehensive or sufficiently flexible to allow for the inclusion of all the criteria that patients, payers, clinicians, or other health care stakeholders care about. Multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) offers a scientifically rigorous decision-making tool capable of including multiple criteria that are important to stakeholders. MCDA has been applied in a variety of sectors, such as investment banking and environmental management, but applications in U.S. healthcare decision making have been limited. MCDA can improve decision making in health care by engaging key stakeholders and by capturing and weighing criteria not found in traditional measures of value, for example severity of disease, quality of evidence, and family burden. By encouraging a comprehensive understanding of value, MCDA offers an opportunity to systematically weigh non-traditional aspects of value that fall outside traditional measures of value. The University of Colorado’s Pharmaceutical Value (pValue) initiative is exploring how MCDA can add evidence on value to improve decision making in health care.