Article
QALY: A Barrier for Patient Access to New Anticancer Agents?
The report by IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics says countries that use a QALY formula to assess cost-effectiveness have less access to new cancer drugs compared with countries that use an alternative system.
Patients living in countries where the cost-effectiveness of a drug is based on the cost per quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) have less access to new cancer drugs compared to countries that do not, a report claims.
An IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics report, made publicly available on March
10,
2015 and commissioned by Janssen Pharmaceuticals, says fewer new cancer drugs are reimbursed in countries that use a QALY appraisal system compared with non-QALY countries. Reimbursement decisions also take longer in QALY countries and new drugs are introduced more slowly, the report says.
The report, ‘Impact of cost-per-QALY reimbursement criteria on access to cancer drugs’ , looked at the reimbursement decisions of ten countries for 26 drugs that had been approved for marketing between 2009 and 2012. They selected nine cancer drugs and 11 non-cancer drugs.
Link to the complete article in The Pharmaceutical Journal:
Link to the IMS Institute report: http://bit.ly/1CroIzk
