Can Scottish NHS data support outcomes based pricing?
The steps needed to implement an Outcomes Based Pricing (OBP) scheme in Scotland have been outlined in a new report from researchers at the University of Edinburgh and DATA-CAN, the UK’s health data research hub for cancer.
The report was funded by AbbVie Ltd but independent editorial control remained with the publishing authors.
One of the authors, Peter Hall, a Reader in the Centre for Cancer Research at the University of Edinburgh, said:
“Outcomes based pricing offers an attractive route to managing the risk associated with the early adoption of new medicines. Scottish healthcare data is world leading and, through the newly formed DataLoch, we are now in a position to demonstrate that it provides a sufficient foundation for the implementation of novel drug reimbursement models.”
Complex Patient Access Schemes for new medicines offer an opportunity for early access to novel treatments that may well provide substantial patient benefit, but where the supporting evidence is uncertain. In this situation early adoption of treatments by the NHS can carry some risk. In the UK the Innovative Licensing and Access Pathway (ILAP) is testing the ability of the NHS, NICE, the MHRA and the Scottish Medicines Consortium to support such schemes.
Outcomes Based Pricing (OBP) offers a fair and transparent mechanism that shares the risk of early drug adoption between a company and the NHS – meaning that the NHS only pays if the promised benefit of a new treatment is borne out with real world use.
In reality, OBP is heavily dependent on the ability of a healthcare system to rapidly obtain and process data on treatment indication and patient outcomes. We believe that Scottish routine NHS healthcare data is now of sufficient quality to support OBP schemes. But proof of principle needs demonstration.
The Data Driven Innovation programme, working with Edinburgh Health Economics, DataLoch, The Edinburgh Cancer Centre, DATA-CAN: The Health Data Research Hub for Cancer and Abbvie report on the current feasibility of an NHS Scotland embedded OBP pilot project.