Pharma

ASCO at work on a scoring system to weigh cost vs. potential benefits of pricey cancer treatments

Cancer doctors and patients need a better way to weigh the potential benefits of new […]

Cancer doctors and patients need a better way to weigh the potential benefits of new targeted cancer treatments against their costs, especially those that carry a price tag north of tens of thousands of dollars per month.

That’s why the American Society of Clinical Oncology has put together a task force to develop a scoring system that would use efficacy, side effect and price data to determine the relative value of drugs.

Richard Schilsky, ASCO’s chief medical officer, told Bloomberg that the task force will not release a list of value ratings for drugs. Rather, a panel of stakeholders including pharma and payer representatives has been working for the past year on a framework for an algorithm that physicians could use to inform discussions with patients.

The scoring system should be presented for public comment later this year, he said, and it may eventually become a point-of-care tool.

Bloomberg’s report quoted Lowell Schnipper, an oncologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and chairman of the task force, as saying such a rating system could potentially keep drugmakers whose products provide only slightly better outcomes than a cheaper option from jacking up their prices. “My guess is that something like this can have a modulating effect,” he said.

Others are more cautiously optimistic. One commenter on the Bloomberg story wrote:

“ In end-of-life discussions, value is extremely hard to quantify in dollar terms. Cost is often driven by palliative care, rather than actual disease treatment. You can live 6 months longer with drug X, but you can live 6 months longer and with a lot less symptoms with drugs XYZ. Both keep you alive the same amount of time, but there’s a lot of cost involved in being alive and feeling decent in those situations.”

 

[Image credit: Flickr user Bilal Kamoon]

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