Health analytics

Broader value of medicines and health

The ways in which we assess and pay for medicines and technologies reflect only the partial value that good health brings to healthcare systems and wider society. To ensure optimal allocation of limited budgets, we must align incentives around the full value of health, incorporating both its direct and indirect benefits for the economy and wider society.

Healthcare payers worldwide are faced with difficult decisions about funding new medicines and treatment innovations against a backdrop of constrained budgets and resources

Governments and payers seek reassurance that investment in health is both affordable and represents good value for money. However, the perspective on value adopted by most healthcare decision makers is narrow, focusing only on cost savings to the healthcare system and outcomes on an individual patient level.

At LCP, we believe that if decision makers broaden their horizons, and consider a more holistic assessment of treatment value, this will lead to improved allocation of budgets.

For example, many governments globally are faced with growing economic inactivity. Healthcare innovations can keep people in employment or support the economically inactive in returning to work. This benefits in terms of both improved net productivity as well as reduced welfare costs.

Further, traditional methods look at outcomes at the aggregate population level, and generally fail to consider whether new technologies or policies improve or exacerbate existing inequalities.

These considerations, among others, have been proposed in recent “inventories” of value elements put forward by ISPOR and the Second Panel on Cost-Effectiveness in Health and Medicine. The ISPOR value flower, for example, incorporates “petals” representing core elements of value (net costs and QALYs gained) as well as potential novel elements, including equity, insurance value, and scientific spillovers. Recent methodological papers are building on this established framework with recommended approaches to incorporating individual, or combined, value element petals.

We help our life science clients include broader value as part of their market access evidence strategies

We work with our clients to look at the broader value of medicines and health, re-aligning how health technology assessment bodies and governments value medicines and the value of health to patients, populations, and economies.

We do this by developing innovative, high value payer-grade and policymaker evidence with a particular emphasis on broader and emerging value elements such as equity and net productivity.

We work with clients in these key ways:

Assessing the net productivity impact of healthcare interventions using established frameworks (e.g. the UK Department of Health and Social Care’s Wider Societal Impacts model, and ICER’s recommended approach for valuing patient and caregiver productivity time by Jiao & Basu, 2023) alongside bespoke solutions.
Developing both qualitative and quantitative evidence to demonstrate the equity impacts of medicines, technologies or health policies. This includes the implementation of methods such as Distributional Cost Effectiveness Analysis cognisant of the challenges facing HTA bodies and payers in assessing such evidence.
Articulating the fiscal value of prevention and treatment measures by quantifying the welfare benefits savings that would be realised by preventing a person from falling out of work due to illness.
Quantifying the insurance value of having a treatment available in case of a future major or rapidly escalating health problem.
Capturing the impact of healthcare interventions on caregivers as well as the patients themselves.
Modelling potential impacts of interventions on waiting lists and linking this to patient, healthcare system and societal outcomes.

We know that change requires partnerships and so at LCP we help to drive collaboration across industry, academia and HTA bodies/payers to ensure tractable progress to move towards a more holistic assessment.