NPC President Dan Leonard Speaks on Value Frameworks at BioNJ

As our health care system shifts from a focus on volume to value, a key question emerges: Who gets to define value? National Pharmaceutical Council (NPC) President Dan Leonard and other health stakeholders explored that question yesterday during a panel discussion on “Replacing Value Frameworks with Patient-Driven Value” at a conference hosted by BioNJ.

With this shift from volume to value, there is a growing interest in how to understand, assess and define value, leading several organizations to develop assessment frameworks. Value assessment frameworks are a new and evolving field, and they have the potential to have tremendous impact, positive or negative, on patient treatment decisions, as well as on coverage and reimbursement decisions.

“We need to define what matters to the patients and incorporate their needs, as well as evidence about how treatments work in the real world, to really understand and define value,” Leonard said.

“Addressing or answering each of these issues is difficult. But this challenge is one that is worth doing to ensure that the right care gets to the right patients, and to ensure that we sustain an environment where innovation is encouraged and rewarded.”

These frameworks emerged in response to multiple factors, including an increased focus on patient-centered care, alternative payment models intended to incentivize health care value and concerns about rising health care costs. Frameworks have the potential for considerable impact on patients, either through their use by patients and their doctors as a shared decision-making tool or by payers to make coverage and reimbursement decisions, so maintaining patient-centricity in the assessment process is critical. Each framework brings a slightly different viewpoint for different audiences, making it clear that frameworks are not one-size-fits-all and that a variety of perspectives are needed. As Mr. Leonard shared, these frameworks are still in their infancy and are not yet ready for prime time, requiring continued conversations and improvements to address the different perspectives inherent in assessing value.

Leonard was joined by panelists Iya Khalil, PhD, of GNS Healthcare, and Robert Goldberg, PhD, of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest, and panel moderator Jayne C. Gershkowitz of Amicus Therapeutics. The panel, hosted by BioNJ at Amicus Therapeutics in Cranbury, New Jersey, was part of a daylong event, “Beyond Value Frameworks: Defining the Value of Medical Innovation.”

To learn more about frameworks, make sure to read NPC’s Guiding Practices for Patient-Centered Value Assessment to learn about key components that should be included to help patients, and Current Landscape: Value Assessment Frameworks to see how existing frameworks stack up. For a deeper dive, read our summary report from our Assessing Value: Promise and Pitfalls conference exploring value frameworks, or watch the full video archive from the conference.