William Padula, PhD
Investigating Methods of Value Assessment
Project Summaries
Frontier Award in Value Assessment
Padula will investigate applications of Generalized Risk-Adjusted Cost-Effectiveness (GRACE) for valuing cancer therapies. GRACE aims to improve health care valuation by accounting for patients’ preferences as they relate to the value of hope, insurance value, and health equity to quantify optimal cost-effectiveness thresholds that rise for more severe diseases and reduce for milder conditions. Padula’s team will work with patient support organizations CancerCare and The Breast Cancer Fundraiser.
“We aim to illustrate the utility of GRACE to improve interpretation of the value of treatments for the most common cancers affecting women and men — breast cancer and prostate cancer,” Padula said. “This work should have important implications for federal agencies such as Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services as they explore new methods in pharmacoeconomics to support drug price negotiation efforts under the Medicare Part D program.”
Research Award in Value Assessment
Value assessment in the 21st century has evolved from simple cost-effectiveness analyses based on calculations about cost relative to health gains in terms of life expectancy and quality of life. Patients and providers now see value beyond cost and quality of life and consider the importance of additional elements such as hope of a cure, health equity, improved accessibility, and even having multiple options for treatment. Together with my team, I am investigating the differences between cost-effectiveness analyses using traditional approaches and risk-adjusted cost effectiveness models that include weights for these other value elements. We are applying these advancements in health economics to treatments for prostate cancer to develop new value propositions for this fatal condition that has been traditionally costly to treat. We plan to communicate our findings to the methodological communities that govern health economics (e.g., ISPOR) and to major public and commercial U.S. payers to illustrate value of care for prostate cancer through a more modern lens.
As the field of health economics grows and develops new alternative methods to traditional economic evaluation approaches, there is an opportunity to explore the utility of these methods to improve patient access to health care and more accurately allocate resources for all those in need. The PhRMA Foundation Value Assessment Research Award enables researchers like me to test these new methods in real-world settings so that we can make health care more accessible and more equitable for all patients in the U.S.
