In my first blog post, I posed a number of questions that were relevant in health economics and genomics. One of these was “Is there a greater role for cost-benefit analysis in genomics?”. I’m working towards contributing to this debate with my PhD (if I ever finish), and one of the byproducts of my PhD is this paper, published over the weekend in PharmacoEconomics, titled: “Welfarism Versus Extra-Welfarism: Can the Choice of Economic Evaluation Approach Impact on the Adoption Decisions Recommended by Economic Evaluation Studies?”. I hope it mght be relevant to other health economists working in genomics, so I thought I would share it here. There are (hopefully!) a few findings of note, but I guess the main take-home message is this: “We found that for every five studies applying both approaches, one shows limited or no concordance in economic evaluation results: the different approaches suggest conflicting adoption decisions, and there is no pattern to which approach provides the most convincing adoption evidence”. It certainly provides food for thought when designing economic evaluations in genomics.
welfarism
Concepts of ‘personalization’ in personalized medicine: implications for economic evaluation
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.
Health Economics and Genomics 