Today the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER) announced its governance board elected me as one of three new members, along with Mark Skinner, president and CEO of the Institute for Policy Advancement, and Anya Rader Wallack, associate director of the Center for Evidence Synthesis in Health within Brown University’s School of Public Health.
The goal of FasterCures has long been to ensure an environment that delivers more, better, faster, and cheaper cures and treatments to patients who need them. In 2015, we partnered with Avalere Health and over 23 organizations representing a wide range of health care to create the Patient Perspectives in Value Framework (link). The PPVF’s goal was to incorporate measures of benefits and costs in the context of patients’ personal goals and preferences to assess the value of different health-care treatment options. Today, the PPVF serves as a guiding light in designing decision support tools and informing the work of value-framework developers.
In addition to advancing the work of the PPVF, it is critical to engage with organizations such as ICER to create that environment and to continue putting patients at the center of the conversation around value. I am eager to work with the ICER leadership and Board to ensure that the signals the market sends to innovators reflect the perspectives of patients and continue to reward the innovation that the patients so desperately need.
Patient Perspectives are Critical to Value Assessments
In May 2017, FasterCures worked with Avalere Health to release version 1.0 of the Patient Perspective Value Framework (PPVF), intended to be a detailed resource useful in assessing the patient perspective on value within health care. With the guidance of an expert Steering Committee that included stakeholders across all aspects of biomedical research and development, Phase I served as a diverse and inclusive methodology for assessing value by including the patient perspective.
With Phase II, we created a scoring procedure to lay the foundation for incorporating patient-oriented value assessment into other frameworks and routine data collection. Phase III, which began earlier this month, will transition this work into the technical implementation stage, and we recognize that Avalere is best positioned to take the lead in this area as the PPVF is used in real-world cases.
FasterCures remains a strong supporter of this effort and are excited for what has been achieved and for what lays ahead in the value conversation.
To learn a bit more about FasterCures’ involvement in the value work done to date and our hopes for the future, read our Q&A with Executive Director Tanisha Carino:
Why does FasterCures still find it a priority to support the value framework?
In a survey of Americans issued by the Kaiser Family Foundation in March 2017, they found that 27 percent of Americans had delayed getting the medical treatment that they needed due to the challenges of affording the care.
This is a critical data point that needs to be addressed. Value assessments are one tool that can be helpful for decision-makers to make tradeoffs among treatment options. However, these tools have to support the treatment goals of patients and reflect what patients and their families believe to be most important. FasterCures and Avalere’s work on the PPVF, along with the partnership of over 20 organizations on the Steering Committee, is an important contribution in explicitly identifying an approach to measuring value that reflects the needs of patients. As more organizations invest in assessing the value of different treatment options, create decision support tools, or even design new payment programs, integrating what we have learned as part of the PPVF is critical.
What are the biggest challenges facing the advancement of the value conversation?
Our greatest challenge remains the lack of recognition of the importance of meaningful patient engagement in the design of health care across the board. This includes how value might be assessed and the subsequent policies – coverage, payment, and other financial incentives – that may flow from these decisions. Too many decision-makers do not recognize the importance of systematically and proactively engaging patients.
What do you hope results from the next phase of this work?
Changing the expectation and norms highlighting the importance of patient engagement and how it could result in a system that maximizes health and affordability is a key focus of FasterCures, and it is our hope that the value framework gets us closer to that ambition. We look forward to working across the health-care system to achieve this goal.
