Brief Blog: ICER Releases Value Framework Update For Public Comment

Boston's ICER, the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review, released an updated "value framework" on February 1, 2017, with comment open until April 3.  ICER promises to post finalized updates to its value framework by April 15.   (It gives itself 12 days or less to review and revise based on public comments.)

See:

• ICER press release here.
• Project home page, here.
• 24-page update PDF, here.
• Coverage at Modern Healthcare, here.

For mostly favorable 2016 articles at STAT, here (April) and here (August).  2016 interview with ICER's head, Steven Pearson, at AJMC, here.  2016 blog at Health Affairs by Pearson, here.  A few weeks ago, Pearson published in JAMA Internal Medicine that national guideline committees for hepatitis and cholesterol management did not fully meet IOM conflict of interest criteria (here).

Assuming that favorable aspects of the work speak for themselves, some contrary viewpoints are:

• A disgruntled blogger, here.
• Critical article in Huffington Post, here.  

Some additional notes after the break.

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ICER is funded in part by the Arnold Foundation (here); the foundation funds multiple efforts at policy institutes that study drug costs (here).

UK pharma organizations have recently voiced concern with newly proposed cost/QALY caps at NICE; see PMLive, January 2017, here.  Similar protests over pricing caps in Ireland for orphan drugs, here (subscription).   For low cost, high value drugs, NICE plans to offer fast track appraisal, here.

For a January 2017 blog, leading to an article, on the complexity of cancer treatment endpoints and the variability induced by small methodological choices, here.  For a second new take on evaluating real-world benefits of cancer drugs, see Salas-Vega et al., JAMA Oncol, December 2016, here.