In a recent post on the IVI-sponsored Health Affairs blog series, Darius Lakdawalla, Executive Director of IVI, and Peter Neumann discuss the use of explicit budget impact criteria in value assessment. Lakdawalla and Neumann write that budgetary concerns are understandable, given that healthcare decision makers are faced with limited resources. Linking short-term budget criteria to assessments of a treatment’s value, however — as in the approach used by the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER) — is fundamentally flawed because it takes a short-sighted view of investment in health and penalizes new technologies while ignoring existing waste and low-value therapies. Instead, they argue novel approaches to payment and delivery of care are needed to facilitate the allocation of resources to the most valuable treatments.

Read the full article here.

About the Health Affairs/IVI Featured Blog Series: Drugs and Medical Innovation — In partnership with Health Affairs, IVI is proud to sponsor the “Drugs and Medical Innovation” blog series. On an ongoing basis, articles in this series will explore topics such as value-based reimbursement, drug policy and pricing, balancing short-term access against long-term rates of innovation, and other relevant issues. Our goal is to create an open forum for sharing ideas and debating issues in these areas, extending the discussion to a broader audience.