Pharmacoeconomics "Have No Place in Licensing"

The pharmaceutical sector of the 1990s has all the necessary characteristics to function in a competitive market context in Europe, with only limited government budgetary controls, Jim Attridge, government and economic affairs adviser to Zeneca Pharmaceuticals, told ICBI's PharmEcon Europe 96 meeting this summer.

The key to achieving the benefits of market-led efficiency lies in putting into place the necessary demand-side customer decision-making infrastructure and information systems, he said. But in reality, central government supply-side controls are becoming more entrenched, with health economics analysis being seen primarily as another weapon in the price and budget controller's armamentarium. Some European Union member states are now seeking to standardize the use of such studies as the primary tool to determine a drug's reimbursement price. But even if such evidence may be relevant to pricing on some exceptional products, there is now no justification for applying it universally to new drugs, said Dr Attridge. It is inappropriate in general terms, and impractical in view of the embryonic state of this discipline across the EU.

Lack Of Cost Databases And Of Work On Other Interventions In most of the EU there is a lack of substantial national patient, disease and treatment cost databases to support such studies. There is also a widening gap between advanced studies on drugs, funded by industry, and the relatively limited work done on other forms of medical interventions such as surgery. Increasingly, the use of the former in making health care decisions will be constrained by lack of comparative data from the latter, he said, and called for more active encouragement of comparative health economics assessment of all alternative forms of medical intervention. Pharmacoeconomics alone can only give a partial view of the relative value of drug therapy, and the narrow application of its outcomes for pricing and reimbursement purposes will often limit achieving the optimal use of all health care resources.