personalised medicine

HERC database of health economics and genomics studies launched today

James Buchanan Other , , , , , , , ,

An increasing number of qualitative and quantitative research papers in health economics and genomics have been published in recent years. To keep track of these publications, and to have a useful summary of available publications at hand, researchers at HERC have set up a database of health economics and genomics studies. I have helped to set up this database, as has Sarah Wordsworth, but a first-year PhD student, Patrick Fahr, has undertaken most of the hard work and should receive the lion’s share of the credit!

Database screenshot 09May18

Continue reading →

Patient Preferences for Genomic Diagnostic Testing

James Buchanan Publication , , , , , , , , , ,

I recently completed my PhD work which considered the issues surrounding the economic analysis of genomic diagnostic technologies in the UK NHS, and I hope to publish as much of this work as possible over the next year or so. The first paper reporting the results of this work was published in 2013 in Pharmacogenomics (“Issues surrounding the health economic evaluation of genomic technologies”) and the second paper was published in PharmacoEconomics in 2015 (“Welfarism versus extra-welfarism: can the choice of economic evaluation approach impact on the adoption decisions recommended by economic evaluation studies?”). I’m please to say that the third paper arising from this work was published last week in The Patient (“Patients’ Preferences for Genomic Diagnostic Testing in Chronic Lymphocytic Leukaemia: A Discrete Choice Experiment”). Continue reading →

Personalised Medicine and Resource Allocation

James Buchanan Other , , , , ,

Yesterday in Oxford we hosted a conference titled “Personalised Medicine and Resource Allocation”. The conference aimed to explore the challenges of implementing genomic medicine into widespread clinical practice, and there was a particular focus on the generation of economic evidence and the ethical issues that arise in the resource allocation decisions required to allow personalised medicine to be realised.

I was pleased to be asked to speak at the event, and I presented alongside Jilles Fermont on “Methodological issues surrounding the health economic evaluation of genomic technologies and a case study of these issues in the research setting”. It was an interesting day overall, and I suspect that others will blog more extensively on the various topics that were discussed. For now, I’ll leave a link to our slides, in case anybody is interested in this topic. For more information on the day itself, please visit the conference website or follow the proceedings on Twitter via the hashtag #PMRAoxford.

Concepts of ‘personalization’ in personalized medicine: implications for economic evaluation

James Buchanan Paper review , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

In my introductory blog post, I noted that genomics might present new challenges for health economics and called for more discussion about appropriate methods in this context. I didn’t anticipate a particularly rapid response, but just a few days after posting I became aware of a new article published in PharmacoEconomics that engaged with many of the issues raised in my introductory post. Titled “Concepts of ‘personalization’ in personalised medicine: Implications for economic evaluations”, this paper reports the results of a workshop which considered where extensions to standard methods might be required in genomics and is a welcome addition to the limited existing literature on this subject. We covered some similar ground in a related paper published in Pharmacogenomics last year, and it is heartening to see that this new paper has reached some similar conclusions and developed a number of these issues further.

Continue reading →