Spotlight on OHE: Valuing Spillovers, End-of-Life Decisions and Hospital Outcomes

OHE’s outside activities in early 2012 focused on spillovers, HTA decision making, and measuring health outcomes.

During January and February 2012, OHE was active in a number of forums and in all three of its main areas of research. 

Economics of the Pharmaceutical and Life Sciences Industries

The economic benefits of research on medicines, inside and outside the pharmaceutical industry, extend far beyond the development of important new therapies. At two recent conferences, OHE summarised the important direct and indirect returns that accrue from “spillovers” between publicly funded medical research and private pharmaceutical R&D.  Dr Jorge Mestre-Ferrandiz presented on this topic at the ABPI Scotland annual conference in February. Jon Sussex’s presentation at the Cancer Research UK Symposium, also in February, is available for viewing in an earlier post by clicking here.

Health Technology Assessment

Koonal Shah participated in the Third Joint CES/HESG Workshop in January, hosted by Inserm-IRD and Aix-Marseille University.  His presentation, “Valuing Health at the End of Life: An Empirical Study of Public Preferences”, summarised preliminary findings from an empirical study on the relative priority that members of the general public would give to life-extending treatments at the end of life.

At the Second Annual Oncology Market and Patient Access conference in January, Dr. Jorge Mestre-Ferrandiz presented preliminary results from OHE research in progress. It analyses appraisals of cancer medicines by HTA agencies in a selection of industrialised countries. The goal is to identify what drives HTA decisions and understand the similarities and differences in requirements across countries.

Financing, Organisation and Delivery of Health Care

Prof. Nancy Devlin also presented at the Third Joint CES/HESG Workshop, presenting a paper entitled “Analysing Hospital Variation and Health Outcome at the Level of EQ-5D Dimensions”.  With funding from an NIHR HSR grant, this research has investigated the impact of surgery on each EQ-5D dimension; the extent to which treatment impact varies across providers; and the extent to which treatment impact across EQ-5D dimensions is correlated within providers.  A summary of the paper reporting this research (see below) is available in an earlier OHE News blog post.

External publications

Gutacker, N., Bojke, C., Daidone, S., Devlin, N., and Street, A. (2012) Analysing hospital variations in health outcomes at the level of EQ-5D dimensions. CHE research paper. 74. York: Centre for Health Economics, University of York.

Spellberg, B., Sharma, P. and Rex, J.H. (2012) The critical impact of time discounting on economic incentives to overcome the antibiotic market failure. Nature Reviews Drug Discovery. 11(2), 168-170.

Watson, V., Sussex, J., Ryan, M. and Tetteh, E. (2012) Managing poorly performing clinicians: Health care providers’ willingness to pay for help. Health Policy. 104(3), 260-271.