Health-economic evaluation of precision medicine in cancer care – literature review and analysis of methodological considerations

Oskar Frisell and Katarina Steen Carlsson
Additional contact information
Oskar Frisell: IHE - The Swedish Institute for Health Economics
Katarina Steen Carlsson: IHE - The Swedish Institute for Health Economics

No 2024:11, IHE Report / IHE Rapport from IHE - The Swedish Institute for Health Economics

Abstract: Precision medicine is often cited for its expected potential to revolutionise health care. The rapid evolution of diagnostics, treatments, and methods to deliver care based on the individual’s unique characteristics promises to increase health gains. These advances also bring new challenges on how to determine whether new and innovative methods are cost-effective in relation to the current standard of health care delivery. Cost-effectiveness information of new medicines is required in many countries across Europe and globally to be included on lists of accepted therapies. The reimbursement decisions then rely in part on the information on costs in relation to health outcomes provided from a cost-effectiveness analysis but also other aspects including equity, affordability, and health care infrastructure.

This report reviews challenges to standard methods for cost-effectiveness analyses raised in health-economic and clinical oncology literature. It also discusses further considerations and challenges when estimating the value of precision medicine interventions. The report concludes that the methods used in health economics are not dependent on the availability of rigorous phase 3 data to be able to assess cost-effectiveness and support decision-makers by sorting out the consequences of uncertainty in the evidence. Indeed, cost-effectiveness analysis and other economic evaluation methods have several tools to deal with uncertainty about effect sizes such as sensitivity analysis and scenario analyses. In that sense, the challenges of precision medicine in terms of greater statistical uncertainty of results can be dealt with using already available tools.

Keywords: precision medicine; oncology; cancer; cost-effectiveness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2024
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ihe.se/app/uploads/2024/09/IHE-REPORT-2024_11_.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:ihewps:2024_011

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IHE Report / IHE Rapport from IHE - The Swedish Institute for Health Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Annette Persson Dietmann ().