Patients and their family members should have a say on the value of new medical treatments, two Rand Corporation scientists argue in an opinion piece in the publication STAT.
“With growing consensus that health care research can be conducted with support and engagement from multiple stakeholders, including patients and the public, we can forge a new and more productive path on even the most contentious topics in health care valuation,” wrote Thomas Concannon, senior policy researcher at Rand, and Lori Frank, a Rand senior behavioral scientist.
Increasingly, policymakers prices new medical interventions by using "value assessment models" to match price with expected benefits, the scientists write.
“Setting aside the views of patients — who have the most to gain or lose from health care interventions — is standard operating procedure in pharmacoeconomic and policy research,” they write. “Their exclusion hasn’t been an oversight — it is by design.”
Some argue that “societal-level preferences are the only way to generate apples-to-apples comparisons of the benefits and costs of every health care option,” Concannon and Frank wrote.
“We contend that obscuring patient perspectives hurts the long-term prospects of these methods and that limited resources will be allocated to interventions for a precisely but thinly conceived notion of 'the public,'” they wrote.
Advocates of the two camps are currently talking past one another and the polarization will only intensify if advocates on both sides become further entrenched, the Rand scientists say.
“The core disagreement can be resolved, but it will require many actors — drug and device makers, insurers, researchers, policymakers, patients and members of the public — to forge a common path forward,” they write.
