COVID-19 changed everything—including how we value health and wellbeing. Donna Cryer, President and CEO of the Global Liver Institute and a member of the Board of the Innovation and Value Initiative (IVI), reflects on value assessment in the post-COVID world.
The events of the past two years “have brought fundamental shifts in our thinking, behavior, and actions,”writes Cryer for Health Affairs' new blog series on value assessment post-COVID.
“They must also bring a shift in what and how we value health and health services,” as value assessments “are primarily discussed in the context of pricing and coverage of new drugs, which often come with high price tags and uncertain outcomes.”
Three “shifts in our thinking” are essential to understanding—and evolving—how we value health care:
1. “We are all connected.” Patient advocates have long called for “models that include the economic and non-economic costs of a disease for those surrounding the sick individual, even for a noncommunicable disease, only to have such costs be regularly labeled irrelevant or unquantifiable,” she says.
“With millions of families now experiencing quarantines after classroom exposures, or, worse, the long-term effects of COVID, perhaps the value of supporting health in our concentric connections is now more apparent.”
2. “We are all essential.” “Perhaps value assessment models will begin to incorporate the tools and services necessary to ensure that everyone can access and benefit from innovative therapies. This will require a commitment to ensuring that the evidence and methods used in value assessment reflect the diversity of patient perspectives and circumstances.”
3. “Sometimes time is a choice.” “The pandemic has created transparency around both real and constructed constraints in drug and diagnostic development, regulatory science, and reimbursement,” she explains.
“For patient advocates, this means a recalibration of the expectations we can set in drug development, approval, and reimbursement for the accommodation of evolving patient needs and the nature of the benefits that therapies deliver.”
The bottom line: “If we learn the right lessons from the COVID pandemic, the future of value assessment will be one that highly values people with—and without—serious, chronic conditions or disabilities as essential members of society,” she concludes—read the whole thing.
Want to know more? Check out the Innovation and Value Initiative (IVI) webinar series on value assessment in a pandemic environment.
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