for. Explicitly accounting for patient preferences can therefore have wide-ranging benefits for patients, health systems, industry, and wider society.
Having a coherent understanding of the needs of both patients and health systems can also improve innovation by allowing industry to recognise and respond to areas of unmet need. Our latest report looks at how Target Product Profile specifications (TPP) can provide innovators with a clear demand signal about the types of tests needed to improve the diagnostic landscape in oncology. Dr. Amanda Cole, an Associate Director at OHE, was quoted in Cancer Research UK’s blog on the report, which outlines how to develop robust, fit-for-purpose diagnostic TPPs for cancer.
The role of public preferences in HTA decision making was made clear in England recently, when the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence’s (NICE) decision not to recommend the breast cancer drug Enhertu for funding on the UK’s National Health Service led to controversy. This decision hinged, in large part, on how NICE defines “severe diseases”, and on how much priority severe diseases should receive relative to less-severe diseases in NICE’s deliberation process. OHE has argued that an understanding of societal preferences are crucial to appropriate severity categorisations.
I will be participating in a panel on a similar question of fairness, around how (or whether) HTA should consider bereavement and grief following the death of a patient. This is just one of a number of OHE panels and presentations at ISPOR Europe later this month, along with sessions on how to account for climate change in HTA, the pricing and reimbursement of multi-indication medicines, and more.
