Posted by Michael Wonder on 28 Mar 2019
Keeping up the PACE at the Scottish Medicines Consortium
26 March 2019 - There are many ways that patient centricity could be delivered when doing a health technology assessment.
The Scottish Medicines Consortium (SMC) – who make recommendations on the cost-effectiveness of new drugs for the NHS in Scotland – introduced Patient and Clinician Engagement (PACE) as part of a suite of ways to capture patient (and clinician) perspectives when they conduct their assessments. First introduced in 2014, what difference is PACE making?
The SMC has a number of ways that patients and their representatives can get involved in the decision making process, the most obvious being through filling in a template and submitting their views to the SMC. In the case of treatments for end of life and very rare conditions, there is the possibility of an additional step in the overall process – PACE. PACE is just another way the SMC approach differs for orphans compared to other drugs; SMC also have modifiers that provide flexibility in their decision making for orphan medicines.
