ASCO to Develop Cost Effectiveness System for Expensive Cancer Treatments

The American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) has decided to use an algorithm to ascertain the relative value of oncology drugs and therefore their cost effectiveness for cancer patients while urging physicians to discuss these costs with their patients.

The ASCO has put together a task force to develop this system in order to find a way to combat the rising cost of cancer treatments, since their costs may be rising but their efficacy is not. They intend to present the system for public comment sometime later in 2014.

The first cancer treatments to be considered will be those for lung cancer, prostate cancer, and multiple myeloma.

"Cancer is one of the primary reasons families go bankrupt today," said task force member Gary Lyman MD of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. "Often families are mortgaging their houses to pay for these expensive drugs. We want to make sure families understand both the benefits of what we can do and the financial impact."

Curiously, the ASCO has put on the task force representatives of both Astra-Zeneca and UnitedHealth Group, a major pharmaceutical company and the largest US health care insurer, respectively.

"My guess is that something like this can have a modulating effect [on drug prices]," said task force chairman Lowell Schnipper of Beth Israel Deaconess in Boston.

This will mark the first time that the ASCO will broach the issue of the actual value of the treatments that their oncologists offer. The value ratings system is expected to be quite influential, since it will be available to physicians on hand-held devices "at the point of therapy," said Lyman.

Source: Bloomberg

More Articles

More Articles

Amazon.com is pleased to have the Lymphoma Information Network in the family of Amazon.com associates. We've agreed to ship items...

The question ought to be what are myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS), since this is a group of similar blood and bone marrow diseases that...

Merkel Cell Carcinoma (MCC) is a very rare and aggressive skin cancer that usually develops when a person is in his or her 70s. It is...

Radiation Therapy Topics

...

At some point, the Seattle biotech company Cell Therapeutics Inc (CTI) should earn an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records for utter and...

Site Beginnings

This site was started as Lymphoma Resource Page(s) in 1994. The site was designed to collect lymphoma...

Three papers appearing in the journal Blood and pointing towards a regulator-suppressor pill could offer hope to blood cancer...

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted a third so-called Breakthrough Therapy Designation for the investigational oral...

The US Food and Drug Administration today has approved an expanded use of Imbruvica (ibrutinib) in patients with...

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has announced that it has granted "Breakthrough Therapy Designation" for the investigational agent...

According to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team from the University of California, San...

Pharmacyclics has announced that the company has submitted a New Drug Application (NDA) to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for...

New research suggests that frontline radioimmunotherapy...

Gilead Sciences has announced results of the company's Phase II study of its investigational compound idelalisib, an oral inhibitor of...

Sitemap