[News article] Whose Numbers Determine if a Targeted Cancer Therapy is “Worth It?”

From the 2 February 2015 Newswise article

Health economics helps insurers, health care systems and providers make treatment decisions based on the cost of extra “units” of health arising from a specific treatment. By calculating the cost for each year of life or quality-adjusted year of life gained, these groups can decide whether changing treatments or adding in a new treatment beyond the existing standard of care is “worth it.”

However, while the resulting incremental cost effectiveness ratio (ICER) is often presented as an absolute measure upon which to base these decisions, an opinion published by University of Colorado Cancer Center researchers D. Ross Camidge, MD, PhD, and Adam Atherly, PhD, suggests that the consumers of these data need to be much more aware of the assumptions underlying these calculations.

“Increasingly physicians are being presented with health economic analyses in mainstream medical journals as a means of potentially influencing their prescribing. However, it is only when you understand the multiple assumptions behind these calculations that you can see that they are by no means absolute truths,” Camidge says.

…..

Related resources

• The Therapeutic Paradox: What’s Right for the Population May Not Be Right for the Patient By SCOTT ABEREGG, MD
  “An article in this week’s New York Times called Will This Treatment Help Me?  There’s a Statistic for that highlights the disconnect between the risks (and risk reductions) that epidemiologists, researchers, guideline writers, the pharmaceutical industry, and policy wonks think are significant and the risks (and risk reductions) patients intuitively think are significant enough to warrant treatment….

• Evaluating Health Information (jflahiff.wordpress.com)
• How to Read a Research Paper (jflahiff.wordpress.com)
• Research Articles Summarized for us All (jflahiff.wordpress.com)

Related articles

• Whose numbers determine cost-effectiveness of targeted anti-cancer therapies?
• Whose numbers determine if a targeted cancer therapy is ‘worth it? ‘
• Whose numbers determine cost-effectiveness of targeted anti-cancer therapies?