“Current Challenges in Health Technology Assessment: Assessing costs and cost-effectiveness of novel treatments in haemato-oncology”

Such formal assessments are important because, since at least two decades, healthcare expenditure on cancer drugs in the European Union increase at a higher rate than the incidence of cancer. Cost-effectiveness analyses are an integral part of a so-called health technology assessment (HTA) through which new treatments are systematically evaluated based on their clinical, economic, organisational, social and ethical aspects.

While the concept of HTA is already in use since the 1980’s, various challenges persist to this day. Frederick Thielen’s dissertation identifies some these challenges and also proposes solutions to make HTA an even more robust and reliable policy tool. For example, Thielen and colleagues proposed a new guideline for systematically finding economic evaluations in biomedical databases. A recommendation that was recently adopted by the World Health Organization (WHO) INTEGRATE framework. Also, he explored the usefulness of using a hospital financial claims database to estimate daily practice healthcare cost of children with sickle-cell disease in the Netherlands. He concluded that these database hold most of the needed information and that average healthcare expenditures of children with sickle-cell disease vary considerable between age groups.

Overall, Thielen concluded that novel and expensive haemato-oncological treatments bear the potential to cure a group of patients, but also put the affordability of healthcare systems at risk.