Avalere Explores Impact of Comparative Effectiveness Research on Healthcare Innovation

Washington, DC (November 17, 2009) – A new Avalere Health report presents an analytic framework for evaluating the impact of comparative effectiveness research (CER) on healthcare innovation. The research – presented at Avalere’s symposium, “Bridge the Gap / Proving the Value of Healthcare Innovation” – comes amid intensifying interest in how deeper federal investment in CER will affect healthcare delivery, access, and costs. Against a backdrop of many new available therapeutic treatments and increased concern about how to pay for them, there has been growing demand for comparative research that determines which interventions are most effective.

Investment in CER – including $1.1 billion of new federal funding appropriated in the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act – has sparked interest from a range of stakeholders on how this research will be structured, disseminated, and used.  At the core of this debate is the important question of how CER investments will shape incentives for bringing new therapies to market—the effect on medical innovation. To address this issue, Avalere researchers convened a roundtable of public and private payers, clinicians, and academic researchers.  Avalere then integrated that expert insight into its own market research and constructed a framework of topics and questions that policymakers and stakeholders must consider in anticipating the full impact of CER on innovation:

• CER Generation: How does the way in which CER is generated affect the knowledge and attitudes of payers, providers, and patients toward using the information in decision-making?
• CER Application: What is the role of CER findings on public and private payer coverage decisions? What types of CER do physicians currently use when making treatment choices?  Is the availability of CER in key therapeutic areas associated with further specificity and differentiation in the type of recommendations presented in clinical guidelines?
• Pharmaceutical Development and Societal Health Outcomes: How does the integration of CER into clinical practice affect the types and timing of product development investment decisions made in the development and commercialization of medical products?  Do different policy constructs shaping clinical practice lead to different product investment decisions?

“The relationship between CER and healthcare innovation is critically important within the context of achieving a balance between prudent purchasing and strategic investment,” said Tanisha Carino, a vice president of Avalere Health and co-author of the report. “When policymakers change how government evaluates medical products, they will change the kinds of studies that are developed to support registration and marketing. Our framework is a guide to help guide policy and commercial decision-making to achieve an appropriate balance.”

“A CER framework should encourage innovation as well as improve health outcomes for patients,” said Les Paul, MD, MS, vice president for Clinical and Scientific Affairs at the National Pharmaceutical Council. “To ensure those goals, we need to address how CER will be generated, disseminated, and integrated by key healthcare stakeholders.”

The report, “Framing the Debate / Untangling the Role of Comparative Effectiveness Research on Innovation,” was authored by Riaz Ali, Jennifer Bowman, Tanisha Carino, Jon Glaudemans, and Elaine Purcell, all of Avalere Health.  Participants in the roundtable are listed in the full report. The paper was written on behalf of the National Pharmaceutical Council, which provided funding for this research. Avalere maintained editorial control and the conclusions expressed in its research are solely those of the authors.

# # #