Developing and communicating a value sharing approach to pricing new pharmaceuticals in the UK NHS

Theme 1:  Empirical and conceptual work relating to medicines pricing

As part of EEPRU-2, EEPRU developed a new approach to quantifying the value of new pharmaceuticals and linking this to appropriate pricing policies. This research  addressed three concerns with current pricing mechanisms: they often fail to reflect the long-term benefits of generics and biosimilars becoming available, they don’t account for the impact of price on R&D and future innovation, and they don’t appropriately account for health opportunity costs. This research suggests that it may be appropriate for pricing policy to move away from assessing value using cost-effectiveness thresholds and towards evaluating how different pricing policies distribute value between manufacturers, patients and health systems.

Discussions with UK policy contacts have indicated that there is significant interest in considering how these methods could be integrated into the way the NHS determines prices for branded medicines in the future. However, there is the need for further evidence about, and clear explanation of, a pricing mechanism based on shares of value.

Aims

Project Team

Beth Woods, Carlos Rojas Roque, Karl Claxton, Mark Sculpher 

Contact

Beth Woods beth.woods@york.ac.uk