Dr Sharon Phares Lists the Many Factors Physicians Should Consider When Choosing Therapies

Sharon Phares, PhD, MPH, chief scientific officer of the National Pharmaceutical Council, explained the importance of taking other factors in addition to gender into consideration when making health care decisions, marking Women's Health Month.

Transcript

How well do health technology assessments currently take into account gender differences? How can it be done better?

Currently, gender differences are not looked at very often only when they are specific to a therapy. So, for instance, if you're looking at a therapy for breast cancer, although men can get breast cancer, they're less likely to. But how they could do it differently is to really look at differences by groups. Do women get impacted the same as men and is the value the same? Similarly, it can be said for other groups, not just men and women, but also people of color, people of different ethnicities, etc, to kind of look at those combinations of gender and racial or cultural identity, as well as some issues around things like socioeconomic status, which can impact the value, so to speak, of a medication for a certain group.