Updates

ICER Faces New Foe As Patient, Disability Alliance Takes Aims At Reports On Mayzent, Spravato

06.28.19

An article in The Pink Sheet highlighted the Partnership to Improve Patient Care (PIPC)’s involvement with Value Our Health — a new initiative supported by organizations representations patients and people with disabilities. The article highlights Value Our Health’s opposition to the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review’s (ICER) use of the quality-adjusted-life-years (QALY) metric, nothing that the patients groups have long criticized the method as a one-size-fits-all approach to addressing the needs of patients. “It is disappointing that ICER continues to reference the QALY as the ‘gold standard’ despite that it distorts and misrepresents how patients value their own lives, and it can lead to insurers and the government to deny care to people who would benefit from it,” said PIPC executive director Sara van Geertruyden. “There are other ways of conducting value assessment, it’s just they just really don’t have the investment that ICER has.”