Health

Health equity

We work with our clients to navigate this complex issue, helping identify and implement tractable measures to embed health equity considerations across clinical development through to access to medicines to reduce inequalities and improve population health.

Why is health equity important?

Despite healthcare progress, inequalities in life expectancy and health outcomes have grown, both within and across countries. Socioeconomic deprivation, ethnicity and geography all contribute to health inequalities, as well as access to medicine and good health care.

Vast inequalities in health outcomes persist in society; the gap in life expectancy between small geographies in England has increased to 21 years in women and 27 years in men, and across countries this is even larger. The link between poorer health outcomes, increased multimorbidity and poor economic and wider societal outcomes has also become more clear.

In response, health equity is of increasing importance to governments, payers and HTA bodies. For example payers are becoming increasingly committed to track variation in access to medicines and incorporate health equity into HTA processes.

Whilst the largest impact on health inequalities is likely to come from public health initiatives, the life sciences sector has a substantial role to play from improving diversity in clinical trials to partnering with health care systems to enable more equitable access and uptake to medicines.

Pharmaceutical companies can play an important role, from more representative clinical trials through to collaborating with stakeholders to demonstrate how their technologies improve health equity.

Our work supports our clients to place health equity at the heart of what they do

A core part of LCP Health Analytics’ purpose is to reduce inequalities through improving health equity

We do this via our work with clients and partners across the life sciences sector to identify tractable solutions to enact this change.

Across market access, we advise clients on key considerations to embed health equity into routine practices and how this varies according to the disease, market, population sub-group or domain of equity (e.g. income, deprivation or ethnicity) and dataset availability.

Specifically, we help our life science clients in these key ways:

Developing and embedding a company health equity strategy from research and development through to the access and uptake of new medicines or technologies
Embed health equity in evidence generation strategies and develop real world evidence quantifying the inequalities in unmet need across population sub-groups such as according to income, deprivation or ethnicity
Use quantitative methods to demonstrate the equity impacts of medicines or technologies such as Distributional Cost Effectiveness Analysis cognisant of the challenges facing HTA bodies and payers in assessing such evidence
Support market access strategies to identify and prioritise health equity activities according to commercial and market access objectives and payer landscape
Environment shaping activities including thought leadership to improve the acceptability and readiness of the healthcare system for equity initiatives and lead the sector

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 improve health equity.