Health Affairs New Blog Series: Drugs and Medical Innovation

There is an ancient Greek saying, "Those whom the gods would destroy, they first [drive mad]."  My variant is, "Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make talk about value-based pricing."

A few months ago, I wrote about a particularly creative and multi dimensional blog published at Health Affairs by Dana Goldman and colleagues at Precision for Medicine (blog here; Goldman is also a professor at USC.)  

So I was happy to see Goldman and company feature additional work at Health Affairs and in the open access format.  Health Affairs will have a new blog series, "Drugs and Medical Innovation" (introduction essay here.)  It's supported by the "Innovation and Value Initiative," here, a pretty elaborate website itself.  (Initial funding of I.V.I. is from Precision Medicine Group.)

From the Drugs and Medical Innovation homepage at Health Affairs, here.   An introductory essay by Goldman et al. is "Rapid biomedical innovation calls for similar innovation in pricing and value measurement" - yes!   Nicholas Timmins responds that value assessment may not be that far off and in need of repair; here.  [Timmins just wrote a book about NICE; here.]

Although not squarely in the same series, within the week Health Affairs also published a blog by Berenson et al., "Refining the framework for payment reform," and one by Lee et al., "The politics of Medicare and drug-price negotiation."