ICER finalizes adaptations for assessing potential cures

US health technology assessor the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER), which has been under fire for the way it assesses the cost-effectiveness of new medicines, has  finalized a set of adaptations to its value assessment framework to be applied when assessing potential cures and other treatments that qualify as high-impact “single or short-term therapies,” or SSTs.

These new methods have emerged from a year-long collaborative project with the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) in the UK and the Canadian Agency for Drugs and Technologies in Health (CADTH), and they have evolved from preliminary proposals with ongoing input from multiple stakeholder groups. It is important to note that these methods adaptations will be implemented by ICER and do not represent preliminary judgments on methodology by either NICE or CADTH. The newly-adapted methods will be launched by the ICER with reviews commencing in 2020 as part of ICER’s overall update to our  value assessment framework.

“Patients and caregivers are celebrating the first cell and gene therapies to reach the market, and they eagerly anticipate many additional one-time therapies that are poised for FDA review over the next few years,” said ICER president Dr Steven Pearson. “We need to think hard about whether the methods of technology assessment and cost-effectiveness analysis are ready to capture the potential for broader benefits of these treatments. We also need to consider whether new methods can better describe for decision-makers the important uncertainties about long-term benefits of short-term treatments. Lastly, some potential cures will offer the promise of preventing massive health care costs over a patient’s lifetime; we need to ask whether the traditional methods of summing up all those cost-offsets and making it a part of a calculation of a ‘fair’ price makes sense for these specialized treatments.