OHE’s research and consulting captures a range of key issues that affect how health care systems are organised and how decisions are made within them. For example, how far to incorporate competition in the provision of NHS-funded health care in England was the focus of the OHE Commission on Competition, which published its report in January 2012.

OHE’s research and consulting captures a range of key issues that affect how health care systems are organised and how decisions are made within them. For example, how far to incorporate competition in the provision of NHS-funded health care in England was the focus of the OHE Commission on Competition, which published its report in January 2012. In October, OHE’s Jon Sussex presented a seminar on competition in the NHS to the University of York’s Centre for Health Economics (presentation below). Drawing on the OHE Commission on Competition report, the seminar reviewed the experience of the NHS in England, discussed objections to competition, outlined the empirical evidence, and presented a framework intended to guide NHS commissioners in deciding about using competition. Jon also presented some new data on competitive procurement of health care services by NHS commissioners.

Approaches to making decisions about access to health care and supporting innovation were the topics of other recent OHE activities.

• In September, OHE’s Martina Garau participated in the Eurordis Roundtable with a presentation on using multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) to demonstrate the value of orphan drugs.  She reviewed the results of a pilot study, which showed that an MCDA approach can enhance value assessment by making the trade offs among value elements explicit and by facilitating the involvement of a range of stakeholders.  For those interested in learning more about MCDA, OHE’s recent book offers an invaluable guide.

• Approaches to decision making were the focus of a workshop that OHE’s Adrian Towse chaired at the ISPOR 15th Annual European Congress. This session discussed the sequence of assessments required to make coverage and research decisions, identifying how each can be informed in practice by quantitative analysis.

• Understanding the interplay between public investment in research and charity funding was the basis for a presentation by Marina Garau to the UK Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. The discussion was based on a study sponsored by Cancer Research UK and published as an OHE Consulting Report last year.

• Knowing what value the public places on life-extending treatment at the end of life can be an important aid to policy makers who must allocate finite health care resources. Two papers co-authored by OHE’s Koonal Shah have explored how this might measured; the most recent paper now is available on our website. Koonal presented the results of the pilot study of this research in September at Priorities 2012, the 9th biennial conference of the International Society on Priorities in Health Care. In October, at the 34th Annual Meeting of the Society for Medical Decision Making (SMDM), he repeated the presentation that earned him the SMDM’s European 2012 Meeting Award for an Outstanding Presentation by a Young Investigator.

Access to OHE publications is available free of charge to registered users. OHE’s slide presentations are available at http://www.slideshare.net/OHENews.