Dr Devin Incerti Outlines Best Practices for Approaching Value Assessment

Devin Incerti, PhD, lead economist, Innovation and Value Initiative, discusses lessons learned and best practices that have emerged as a result of different approaches to value assessment.

Transcript

Looking at different approaches to value assessment, what lessons learned and best practices have emerged?

One of the most common ways to do value assessment is what I would call a conventional cost-effectiveness analysis. This is used particularly in Europe, but really around the world, and they’ve been doing it for the last 40 years or so. What that means is that the methods are very well-established, we have good ways to do it, and it lets us help guide decision making. We can use it to set prices, we can use it to make coverage decisions, we can assess uncertainty. If you’re a decision maker, you might not want to just make a decision; you might want to know the uncertainty you have with that decision, and luckily those methods let us do that.

One other thing: the conventional cost-effectiveness lets us think about opportunity costs, which is, in my mind, a very important concept. If you’re introducing a new technology, it’s not free. There’s something else you could have done instead. You might have to displace a particular investment that’s already there. You might have to spend less on healthcare, or more on healthcare and less on other goods and services in the economy. And cost-effectiveness lets us do all of those things.