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Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
And the robustness of the economic evaluation. In a nutshell, NICE will typically decide that the NHS should make a new drug available if the benefits of the new drug are greater than the opportunity cost (the health benefits from other drugs or health care interventions that are forgone once part of the health care budget has been used to buy this new drug instead).In the 2010s, it took NICE an average of 48 weeks to complete the appraisal for a single drug and 74 weeks for a group of drugs. NICE typically starts the assessment process before the pharmaceutical company has launched the drug in the UK, with the aim of publishing its recommendations at around the same time it becomes available to purchase. Nevertheless, NICE has been criticised for the time it takes to complete assessments and provide recommendations on new drugs.Quality-adjusted life years (QALY) and incremental cost-effectiveness ratios (ICERs)NICE has developed a detailed methodology for assessing the costs and benefits of new drugs in comparison with other drugs and interventions, with the aim of identifying which drugs offer the greatest benefits given their costs. NICE uses the information supplied by the company to calculate the number of ‘quality-adjusted life years’ that patients will, on average, gain from taking the new drug, in comparison with existing therapies. This encompasses not just the number of extra years of life that the drug offers in comparison with other therapies, but patients’ quality of life, for example, reduction in pain or ability to perform basic activities of daily living.With a measure of the health benefits of the new drug in comparison with existing therapies, and the price of the new drug and associated treatment costs in comparison with existing therapies, NICE can calculate an incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) for the new drug, that is the cost, using the new drug, of each additional quality-adjusted life year. The method allows NICE to make consistent decisions about whether to pay for interventions across different technologies, clinical areas and patient groups, and the opportunity costs of paying for one health care intervention at the expense of another. With these calculations, we can imagine a virtual merit order of drugs reflecting their costs and benefits, from those with the lowest ICER to those with the highest. Cheap, effective drugs for fatal diseases in children might come at the top of the list, delivering a huge
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