Can Improved QALYs Effectively Reduce Drug Prices?

Dan Ollendorf of Tuft’s Center for the Evaluation of Value and Risk in Health (CEVR) shared his thoughts on how the quality-adjusted life-year (QALY) measure could impact prescription drug prices. The QALY is a measure of the benefits of a drug on a patient’s life, although it has faced rejection from many patient support groups and pharma. Ollendorf calls on pharma to reexamine the QALY metric, noting that opinion of this metric has fluctuated in the course of his career.

Ollendorf remarks, “The QALY cannot capture all of the nuances and challenges of living with a certain condition. But is that why the pharmaceutical industry’s opinion of it has shifted from useful policy tool to venomous device? Or is it simply no longer a convenient method for justifying ever-increasing prices?” Read more here.

(Source: Dan Ollendorf, STAT News, 5/7/21)