Value-based pricing "not in patient interest" - PMLiVE
The UK government's plans to introduce a new system of drug pricing that takes into account the wider value of a new medicine is neither in the patient interest nor national interest, according to a leading healthcare think-tank.
2020health said it approached the subject from the patient's perspective and concluded that the current PPRS system for drug reimbursement has kept UK medicine prices below the average in advanced countries and also supported R&D.
However, if the government goes ahead with a planned 2014 switch to value-based pricing (VBP) – which would take into account wider societal benefit, extended cost savings and the medical value of a drug to different patients – it could harm both access to drugs in the UK and the country's research environment...
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Its other recommended changes to the current pricing system include lowering the price of older drugs so that companies are given the leeway to sell new medicines at a higher price, while bonuses should be offered to companies marketing drugs for less common conditions.
Go to the site of PMlive to collect the report!
Value Based Pricing for drugs is not an easy concept. Read the blog, and better still, the report.
Trying to improve access schemes for patients to drugs, trying to stimulate better therapies, processes of care and better outcomes is not a matter of pricing in the first place. To improve care is a matter of looking at the caring process with a partnership of different disciplines in care, providers, pharmacists, industry (sure!), payers and last but not least: patients.
Close collaboration of partners might lead to accommodation of pricing measures to each party's interest, other than 'just' intervention or volume based pricing. To work closely and sustainably together is the very condition to lower price per patient per year in the long term. When partners in care can then accommodate their part of return discussing each party's share, we can move on in trust, and still in concordance with everyone.