Los Angeles, September 6, 2020 - Members of the Lydion Research Alliance advanced their work on data economic approaches to health care outcomes with a study that was presented at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) meeting, the largest annual meeting for cancer-related researchers in Europe.
“As health care systems in Europe and elsewhere become more interested in linking payments to real health outcomes, one of the challenges remains that the original data from clinical trials in fields such as cancer is not always predictive of exactly what will happen with patients in the real world,” said Arka Ray, one of the study’s authors and part of the Lydion Research Alliance. “While this phenomenon has been acknowledged for a long time in health research, it presents a problem for pricing, as the true value of new technologies and therapeutics may not be understood until years later; we hypothesize that if we can better model and predict future health outcomes, we can better understand the future value of new technologies and therapies.”
“Projecting future clinical outcomes based on current clinical trials data is a barrier to the adoption of more outcomes-based, value-based payment mechanisms for high-cost drugs,” said Jennifer Hinkel, MSc, member of the Lydion Research Alliance and a doctorate student in Evidence Based Health Care at the University of Oxford who presented the study to the ESMO audience. “Challenges exist both in defining and standardizing what society can agree are meaningful outcomes for serious diseases such as cancer, and then quantifying what are reasonable prices to pay to achieve those outcomes. Once we can reach consensus on those topics, we still need to understand what the potential risk parameters would be to, for example, a payment scheme that provided refunds when a drug treatment doesn’t work for a patient. This is a fascinating topic because the clinical and financial aspects are so intertwined; if we’re able to measure, define, and project risk, we could potentially open up new financing mechanisms for drug development and for patient access to novel therapies without health systems having to carry the risk that the treatment may not work. Our work in this space is advancing such new financial tools, with the hope that this would allow more patients to be treated with cutting-edge therapies for serious and life-threatening diseases.”
The Lydion Research Alliance has been involved with research around data economic approaches to value-based an outcomes-based payments in health care since 2018, and has presented various aspects of its research at major international scientific conferences including the annual meetings of ESMO, ASCO (American Society for Clinical Oncology), and ISPOR (International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research). The Alliance’s findings related to outcomes-based financing for health care products have been integral in its development of software in the form of Lydion Solution Platforms for health sciences partners, based on the Lydion Data Economics Operating System (Lydion DEOS), that allow for the automatic and distributed management and adjudication of outcomes-based and value-based agreements. This software has already been piloted by large pharmaceutical customers in the United States as health insurers around the world gain an interest in new mechanisms for drug payment and risk management for expensive therapeutics.
About the Lydion Research Alliance:
The Lydion Research Alliance is a consortium of scientists, engineers, economists, technologists, artists, and futurists dedicated to the advancement of the scientific field of Data Economics and the commercialization of Data Economic technologies.