Health Equity

Aligning Health Technology Assessment with Efforts to Advance Health Equity, 2022: The Partnership to Improve Patient Care (PIPC), Global Liver Institute, National Minority Quality Forum, and the Preparedness & Treatment Equity Coalition have published a new report (executive summary) to assist organizations, health systems, payers, and policymakers that want to center their value assessment work on health equity.

Issue Brief: Traditional Value Assessment Methods Fail Communities of Color and Exacerbate Health Inequities, 2020: As healthcare costs in the United States have continued to grow, there has been an increasing desire to move towards “value-based” care in which patients and payers would be paying for the “value” of the treatment patients receive. This idea has been gaining particular momentum as policymakers look for strategies to curtail spending on pharmaceuticals. While there is merit in paying for services and treatments that work and eliminating wasteful spending, it is important to step back and consider to whom “value” is being provided. As the ultimate beneficiary, we would advocate that the measure of “value” in a healthcare setting should focus on value to the patient, but currently, we are concerned that the trend is to look towards “value” to the payer by prioritizing reduced cost over care outcomes for patients in the form of cost-effectiveness analyses.

More than 40 Leading Organizations Join PIPC Comment Letters on Efforts to Advance Health Equity in Value Assessments, 2022: More than 40 leading groups representing patients, people with disabilities, older adults, and communities of color joined the Partnership to Improve Patient Care (PIPC) in comment letters to the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER) and the Innovation and Value Initiative (IVI) regarding the methodological flaws of the health technology assessment (HTA) and its implications for health equity.

IVI and Sick Cells Release Paper on Finding Equity in Value: The report provides an in-depth examination of potential equity implications arising in the HTA process. It identifies multiple interrelated factors with implications for racial and health equity, most of which derive from two key issues: small unrepresentative groups of HTA specialists have exclusive control over HTA decisions, and there is widespread bias and omission in scientific evidence and methods. The whitepaper illustrates how these factors influence real-world HTA processes using real-world case studies and provides recommendations to improve HTA processes so they better support health equity through action and change across all aspects of the healthcare ecosystem.

Chairman Coelho on the Importance of Health Equity: Chairman Coelho published a blog highlighting the timeliness of the report on Aligning Health Technology Assessment with Efforts to Advance Health Equity, noting the importance of its recommendations for CMS, CMMI and HTA organizations as they seek out evidence related to health care value that is inclusive and nondiscriminatory.