Dr Devin Incerti: Use Value Assessments to Maximize the Well-Being of a Population

If you set social benefits equal to social costs, you will be able to maximize the well-being of a population, and that's what value assessment allows for, explained Devin Incerti, PhD, lead economist, Innovation and Value Initiative.

Transcript

What are some alternatives to health technology assessments that has the greatest promise?

I think maybe one of the first questions that I always ask myself is: what is really the purpose of value assessment and what is the purpose of allocating resources in healthcare? In my mind, we’re really trying to maximize the well-being of the population. And to do that, it turns out, we know that from economic theory that you can do that if you set the social benefits equal to the social costs, and value assessment provides a very nice way to do that. In most markets, such as the markets for private goods, buyers and sellers pay for things and we know their willingness to pay, but we don’t actually have that in healthcare and because of that, we kind of need to have something that almost attempting to do that but isn't quite right, and value assessment is exactly that. So, maybe it doesn’t quite answer the question, but in my mind value assessments actually get at the best of our ability and that’s exactly what we’re trying to get at, which is to maximize the well-being of the population.