Dr Steven Pearson Outlines the Goals of ICER's Drug Assessment Program

The Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER) created a new drug assessment program with the goal of changing how drugs are priced and evaluated, according to Steven Pearson, MD, MSc, FRCP, founder and president of ICER.

Transcript (modified)

What are the goals of the ICER’s new drug assessment program?

From our perspective, the current landscape for how drugs are priced and evaluated, especially at or near the time of FDA approval, has really been broken. In some ways it’s been a black box, but what we do know is that there has not been any consistent way for the discussions about effectiveness and value to be woven into the way that drugs are covered and priced at the beginning.

There’s still a lot to do, also, with drugs that have been on the market for a long time, when the evidence of their effectiveness or their price changes rapidly. But our new program is meant to “ramp up” the focus, primarily in the short term, on emerging, significant drugs at or near the time of their approval. And our goal is to provide reports that can be used by insurers, by doctors’ groups, by policy makers, and by patients, to try to get a much clearer view of the comparative effectiveness and value of these drugs.

With that information we now include what we call a value-based price benchmark. And that, too, is meant to send a signal that, if we wish to do a better job of pricing drugs according to the added benefits that they bring to patients, we want to provide a marker to kind of trigger the right discussions, negotiations, and policies that will focus on value.