Posted by Michael Wonder on 09 Sep 2017
Should value frameworks take a ‘societal perspective’?
6 September 2017 - In 1996, the U.S. Panel on Cost-Effectiveness in Health and Medicine recommended that analysts conducting cost-effectiveness analyses should perform a reference case analysis, following a set of standard methodological practices to improve comparability and quality.
They further recommended that such analyses assume a societal perspective, reflecting the perspective of a decision maker allocating resources broadly across the entire population (such as consequences of interventions that fall outside the health sector).
Since publication of the original Panel’s report, researchers have published thousands of CEAs. However, as highlighted in the recently published report of the Second Panel on Cost-Effectiveness in Health and Medicine, many if not most CEAs have failed to use a societal perspective. Only 341 (29%) of 1,163 cost per quality-adjusted life year analyses published through 2005 adopted a societal perspective, for example.
