Dr Devin Incerti on the Need for Global Value Assessment to Be Adaptable

Devin Incerti, PhD, lead economist, Innovation and Value Initiative, discusses the need for global value assessments to be adaptable for countries that place emphasis on certain values.

Transcript

Is there a need for a global value assessment to be adaptable to different countries who might place emphasis on certain values?

I think that’s going to be very important. So, while we do have conventional cost-effectiveness and it works quite well, it’s also very context specific. So, take one example: people have come up with this concept called the fair innings argument. It basically says that there may be some cases where individuals live a shorter amount of time. So, if you’re a really sick young infant, if you’re a really sick young kid, your life expectancy might be much shorter than someone who lives a full lifespan. And because of that, we might want some concept of equity where we think about, maybe we want to value the treatments that are going to treat patients that are very sick, very young, maybe those with rare diseases more than we value a treatment that affects the entire population. So, these are all equity considerations that are really, they’re not mathematical. They reflect the value of a particular society.