As a health technology assessment (HTA) organization, ICER works to evaluate how emerging medical interventions serve to improve patients’ lives. It also suggests benchmark prices that fall in line with an intervention’s benefit to patients and the overall healthcare system.
In its 2020 Value Assessment Framework, ICER outlined plans to generate RWE for assessments. Additionally, the group recently laid the groundwork for harnessing RWE in two-year reevaluations of US FDA-approved drugs, under accelerated approval routes.
Broad health industry benefits
An Aetion spokesperson told Outsourcing-Pharma that the use of RWE benefits people across the healthcare spectrum.
“It furthers ICER’s mission of catalyzing a movement toward fair pricing, fair access, and future innovation across the entire US health system,” they said.
Pamela Bradt, chief scientific officer for ICER, said analytics from Aetion’s Evidence Platform will empower the organization to more efficiently gather evidence for its review process.
“Through this partnership, we aim to set new standards for how RWE can better inform the consequential decisions that biopharma manufacturers, insurers, and other stakeholders make every single day around drug pricing and patient access,” Bradt said.
Sharing information
According to Aetion, protocols developed via the partnership with ICER will be included in assessments that ICER shares publicly. The open sharing of information, in turn, will benefit other stakeholders in the industry.
“Integrating RWE into ICER’s assessments will advance how we as a health care industry—and a society—determine value,” said Carolyn Magill, CEO of Aetion.
Aetion has partnered with several organizations and companies to promote use of RWE. In August 2018, Harvard Medical School and Brigham’s Women’s Hospital tapped the Evidence Platform to support their Reproducible Evidence Practices to Enhance and Achieve Transparency (REPEAT) program.
Additionally, in October 2019, McKesson and Aetion announced a collaboration to advance the use of RWE in cancer research.