Michael Thompson: Employers Are Grappling With High Costs of Novel Therapies

Novel therapies come with high costs, but they have the potential to more effectively treat some patients, and employers are struggling to handle the cost burden of them, said Michael Thompson, president and chief executive officer of the National Alliance of Healthcare Purchaser Coalitions.

Transcript

How are employers viewing the changing landscape as we see more precision medicines come to market that require genetic and diagnostic testing? What are they doing to manage these ballooning costs?

Increasingly, the medications that are coming out are really effective for some subset of the population…and they’re also very expensive at the same time. So, I think employers are very interested in getting more precise on how these medications get used for their population. That may require genetic testing and other diagnostic elements to better fit the medication to the individual.

And from our perspective, what we believe is what they’re most interested in is getting people to the right medications faster. Because that costs less because of all the trial and error per [quality-adjusted life-year] that can emerge when you don’t get to the right medications right away.