Use by Different Stakeholders
One of the core goals of Open-Source Value Platform models and their accompanying web interfaces is to help inform the real-world decisions of a variety of stakeholders in the U.S. healthcare market.
All healthcare decision makers require (and deserve) high-quality evidence on treatment benefits and costs to make coverage decisions, negotiate prices, and guide treatment discussions.
And yet different decision makers face diverse decision contexts. For instance, some cover or treat very sick populations, while others address the needs of patients with milder, earlier-stage disease. Some care exclusively about health gains compared to costs, while other decision makers factor in adjacent outcomes like workplace productivity. Our open-source models provide flexibility to adapt to these different scenarios and needs.
IVI’s Open-Source Value Platform disease-specific models are demonstrations of a flexible approach to value assessments that can provide customized information to a wide range of stakeholders making many different kinds of decisions over time.
A Flexible Modeling Approach at the Individual Level
Open-Source Value Platform models simulate health outcomes and risks associated with sequences of treatments for individual patients within the model, each with their own characteristics, disease course, and health outcomes. The models are designed to be flexible so that:
- Results can be tailored to the unique characteristics (e.g., age, gender, disease activity) of specific populations of interest to a specific user;
- A range of modeling approaches based on the prior academic literature can be selected, analyzed, and debated;
- Users can decide to consider costs to the healthcare system alone or include broader societal costs such as effects on patients’ earnings;
- Important values such as drug prices can be easily edited;
- Users can consider components not usually included in value models—for example, the value of available treatments to the currently healthy, the value of hope, and patient preferences for treatment attributes such as mode of administration.
To ensure that simulated outcomes reflect outcomes in routine practice, IVI models “baseline event rates” (i.e., disease progression, mortality, time spent on a given treatment), patient preferences, and costs using real-world data. To enhance validity, relative treatment effects (i.e., differences in safety and efficacy across difference treatments) are, when possible, based on randomized controlled trials (RCTs).
Applications in Value Assessment
Open-Source Value Platform models currently support two approaches to value-oriented decision analysis: cost-effectiveness analysis and multi-criteria decision analysis.