Health Economics and Outcomes Research – What’s the Value?
pharmafile | July 2, 2012 | Feature | Medical Communications | HEOR, clinical evidence, economic evidence, market access, value
Pricing pressure and regulatory restrictions across various healthcare industries have called for more detailed evidence of outcomes of healthcare products. Kevin Mayo, Senior Director of Health Outcomes & Pharmacoeconomics at Endo Pharmaceuticals, states that “stakeholders are increasingly relying on Health Economics and Outcomes Research (HEOR) information to fully understand product value in healthcare and its potential in real-world clinical practice”. In order to gain market access, medical technology manufacturers must be able to demonstrate the clinical and economic evidence to providers, healthcare decision-makers and payers to be able to remain competitive.
In this increasingly complicated environment, the methods to gain market access are becoming more complex especially considering payers/physicians/patients each have their own specific interests in healthcare products. Currently, HEOR is defined as a scientific discipline that quantifies the economic and clinical outcomes of medical technology and helps manufacturers communicate the value of their innovations to stakeholders. It is becoming a central component for demonstrating product value which encompasses aspects such as clinical efficacy, real-world data, patient quality of life reports, opportunity cost of various treatment mixes, budget impact, and cost-effectiveness models, which eventually supports the allocation of resources for the acceptance and reimbursement of new products.
HEOR, once considered just a support function, is now playing a central part of the internal decision-making process. Pharmaceutical companies have brought HEOR professionals and brand strategists together in order to build streamlined value chains. HEOR can now provide useful information for licensing and R&D, as well as pricing and market access strategies, and will help to dictate research, planning and sales strategies. It will be essential for HEOR teams to start to efficiently measure their own impact to justify their importance. Currently less than 10% of US companies measure the return on investment of their HEOR efforts. In order to argue the significance of HEOR evaluation systems, a value development plan should be integrated into any HEOR strategy planned to be used as a core business function. The Value Development Plan (VDP) uses evidence-based recommendations to demonstrate and communicate value:
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Value Determination – Benchmarks available alternatives in a therapy area based on clinical/economic value.
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Value Demonstration – Identifies tactical outcomes research and economic model projects to demonstrate the clinical and economic elements, respectively, of the target value proposition.
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Value Communication – Helps to inform and define the value communication strategy and tactics for relevant audiences.
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Value Realization – Defines price ranges for products based on demonstrated value and addresses reimbursement and seamless market access.
With the shift towards an outcomes perspective, new technologies are being developed to enable the communication of this often complex information in the form of ‘field tools’ for commercial teams. BaseCase builds spreadsheet-driven, cloud-based apps which effectively visualize HEOR models to communicate the value of new products to the various stakeholders. With features such as interactive slide decks, dashboards, value dossiers and embeddable calculators, these apps are especially useful during the sales process where health outcomes liaisons must communicate quickly and smartly the benefits of a new product.
Going forward, it will be imperative for pharmaceutical companies to build and integrate HEOR into their marketing and sales strategy, to provide the economic evidence needed to demonstrate value.
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