 | On October 23, PIPC submitted comments on the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review's (ICER) assessment of Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension (PAH) treatments. |
The letter is critical of ICER's assessment for relying on the quality-adjust-life-years (QALY) metric, which has consistently discriminated against patients with chronic conditions and people with disabilities. PIPC is also concerned that ICER chose to use a health state transition model (HSTM), which is unable to evaluate heterogeneity of patients and the relative effectiveness of therapies on those populations.
"Even patients with well controlled PAH deal with serious impacts on their quality of life and are often forced to radically alter their lifestyles in order to manage their disease," wrote PIPC Chair Tony Coelho. "PIPC urges ICER to reconsider the use of the QALY along with several of its modeling choices given many of them do not accurately represent the pathway of a PAH patient or convey the potential value of an effective treatment."
"Even patients with well controlled PAH deal with serious impacts on their quality of life and are often forced to radically alter their lifestyles in order to manage their disease," wrote PIPC Chair Tony Coelho. "PIPC urges ICER to reconsider the use of the QALY along with several of its modeling choices given many of them do not accurately represent the pathway of a PAH patient or convey the potential value of an effective treatment."
| pipc_pah_icer_comment.pdf |
