Abstract

A common criticism of the pharmaceutical industry is that it fails to achieve transparency, and although payers widely use the industry’s health economic models to determine whether patients are able to receive access to new medicines, the models themselves are often shrouded in secrecy.

A recent survey found that making health economic models available in an open format was considered beneficial by 97% of those health economic stakeholders surveyed [1]. While there have been welcomed efforts to improve the transparency of health economic models, such as the ISPOR -SMDM guidelines, individual models developed in the same therapeutic area may differ significantly from one another and the sharing of the model code is arguably an almost nonexistence practice.

This seminar will explore the tantalizing question as to whether the pharmaceutical industry could help improve transparency and benefit patients through providing open access to their health economic models. The claim is that a lack of transparency can lead to inconsistent methodology and inefficiencies which could in turn lead to misalignment between pharmaceutical companies’ development programs and healthcare systems’ needs. Dunlop will explore the culture of not sharing health economic models, present published open source health economic model case studies and present findings from a survey outlining the desire from the community for greater transparency.

Everyone is welcome, no sign-up required. More information can be found here

[1] Report: Benefits, challenges and potential strategies of open source healthcare models – https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5209409/