Reimagining Health Care Value Assessment The Patient-Driven Values in Healthcare Evaluation Center of Excellence puts the patient first
By Christianna McCausland
The conventional model of value assessment used to facilitate health care decision-making has traditionally neglected to capture the patient perspective. While a treatment might be an effective therapeutic, it may also cause the patient to miss many days of work due to side effects, for example. These patient-informed factors have generally played a minor role in assessing the value of a treatment — if taken into account at all. The School of Pharmacy’s Patient-Driven Values in Healthcare Evaluation (PAVE) Center of Excellence, a collaboration with the National Health Council, is bringing together the patient community and payer and industry leaders to put the patient perspective front and center in health care decision-making. PAVE is more than a clever acronym; it represents a revolutionary way of thinking about this issue. “As the PAVE Center, we are trying to ‘pave’ a new pathway for better understanding the value of health care interventions, and that means bridging two pathways of research and integrating information in a way that’s not been done before,” explains Susan dosReis, PhD ’99, BSPharm, a professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Health Services Research (PHSR) and director of the PAVE Center, 14
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which was established in 2018 through a $500,000 grant from the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) Foundation. “Understanding patient preferences and value assessment of health care interventions have typically been two separate lines of work and research,” she continues. “We’re trying to break new ground with empirical data to show how we can integrate these two and provide a more nuanced understanding of health care value. We do this by incorporating novel information about what’s important to patients that is not typically included in a traditional evaluation.” One PAVE research study, for example, examined chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Research showed that medication frequency is important to patients. If patients could take medication fewer times per day, they would have more flexibility to engage in life activities. Yet this aspect of treatment is not measured in COPD clinical trials, which focus more on outcomes like exacerbations. Julia Slejko, PhD, is an associate professor of PHSR and codirector of the PAVE Center. Her work looks closely at the economics of health care decision-making. She explains that traditionally, when
