Cergas Webinar "Health opportunity costs, equity considerations and health-care decision making"

Recently, empirical estimates of the marginal cost at which health care produces a QALY (k) have begun to emerge. These estimates enable health-maximizing decision makers to determine if adopting a treatment will improve overall health in the health-care system. However, in practice, prioritization decisions often include other considerations than just efficiency. Pharmaceutical reimbursement in Sweden is one such example, where the reimbursement authority (TLV) uses a threshold range to give priority to disease severity and rarity. In this talk, I will elaborate on how estimates of k may be used to quantify how much health is forgone when a new technology is funded in place of other health-care services when taking equity considerations such as disease severity into account. In so doing, some of the current empirical research will be put into a practical context drawing from my experiences as a member of the pharmaceutical benefits board in Sweden.

Speaker Martin Henriksson, Linköping University link bio