The Journal of Managed Care and Specialty Pharmacy (JMCP) has published the work of several leading researchers in health-care value assessment, who were recipients of the PhRMA Foundation’s 2018 Challenge Awards for innovative research proposals.
The Challenge Awards are part of the PhRMA Foundation’s ongoing Value Assessment Initiative, which is putting an emphasis on evidence-based research that determines the true value of medicines and is dedicated to promoting innovative and groundbreaking research to better the lives of patients.
The PhRMA Foundation partnered with the Personalized Medicine Coalition to sponsor the 2018 Challenge Awards in an effort to facilitate research aligning value assessment with personalized medicine—in which prevention and treatment strategies are guided by diagnostic tests that identify specific biological markers, along with the consideration of patient circumstances and preferences.
Recipients of the Challenge Awards were asked to address this question: What are potentially transformative strategies and methods to define and to measure value at all levels of decision making that are aligned with personalized/precision medicine?
Three 2018 award-winning proposals were summarized by JMCP:
In “Genome Diagnostics: Novel Strategies for Measuring Value,” Robin Hayeems et al. focus on the development of a tool to measure the “informational value” of new genomic diagnostics to patients. They aim to develop, validate, apply, and disseminate a novel, stakeholder-informed measure of utility.
In “Patient-Level Modeling Approach Using Discrete-Event Simulation: A Cost- Effectiveness Study of Current Treatment Guidelines for Women with Postmenopoausal Osteoporosis,” Quang Le illustrates the value of using discrete-event simulation modeling to incorporate individual characteristics and clinical profiles into value assessment at the patient level. Le evaluates the cost-effectiveness of the current treatment guidelines for women with postmenopausal osteoporosis.
Louis Garrison and Adrian Towse approached the question at a health system level in their proposal “A Strategy to Support Efficient Development and Use of Innovations in Personalized Medicine and Precision Medicine,” by suggesting policies that promote dynamic efficiency in research and development to support personalized/precision medicine globally. They lay out 6 basic cross-cutting policy principles that include the need for flexible value-based pricing, the need for real-world evidence generation, and the complementary nature of the inputs in personalized/precision medicine.
Recognizing that traditional value measurement methods are limited, the PhRMA Foundation’s Value Assessment Initiative aims to drive research that develops and assesses value frameworks through an open and transparent process. That process includes meaningful input from patients and providers, consideration of patient differences and preferences, and the delivery of reliable and relevant information to inform health care decision making.
You can learn more at our Value Assessment Initiative page.
