This post summarises OHE’s activities at this year’s ISPOR Latin America conference in Santiago, September 2015. Topics include policy options for formulary development in middle-income countries, and role of HTA in definition of health benefit plans.

ISPOR 5th Latin America Conference, Increasing Access to Health Care in Latin America: Making Better Decisions for Greater Equity, took place on 6-8 September 2015 in Santiago. 

Martina Garau from OHE attended and presented key research as part of a symposium on “Sustainable universal health coverage”. Martina’s and the other panellist Manuel Espinoza’s presentations are summarised below.

Policy options for formulary development in middle-income countries

This symposium held on Sunday 6th September combined two presentations on approaches to support middle-income countries set priorities within their healthcare systems and progress towards universal health coverage.

The first presentation by Martina Garau presented initial results of a study undertaken by OHE and the University of Washington, funded by PhRMA, which sets out possible policy approaches to managing national formularies. 

Key points raised included the need for formulary decision making to embrace factors linked to the health system objectives (such as provision of financial protection against catastrophic health expenditure); and that structured approaches (including simple forms of multi-criteria decision-analysis – MCDA) should be adopted to clearly define and combine the factors to consider and explicitly establish their trade-offs.

Access Martina’s presentation here.

The second presentation by Manuel Antonio Espinoza (Assistant Professor, Department of Public Health, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile) focused on health benefits plans and how HTA processes can help inform and facilitate health benefits plans development. Manuel Espinoza also provided insights from his experience in priority setting processes in a number of Latin America countries where systematic approaches have been applied to identify priority “health problems”.

Access Manuel’s presentation here.

The session was chaired by Professor Adrian Towse and sought to stimulate discussion about optimal approaches for formulary decision making, disease priority setting, and health benefit plan coverage of treatments in middle-income countries.