Five Policy Levers To Meet The Value Challenge In Cancer Care.
The burden of cancer on public finances is a serious concern for policy makers. More people are developing cancer, and as standards of care have risen, more are surviving and requiring longer-term care. Precision medicine promises better outcomes but demands commensurately higher payments for care. As both incidence and per case costs rise, we suggest that the task of expanding access to high-quality cancer care poses a "value challenge" that policies in many countries are inadequate to meet. Policy makers should respond with a new approach. We explore questions that policy makers will need to consider regarding objectives, barriers, and levers for policy development. We use transparency and accountability as cornerstones of a new approach to promote value-based decision making. Although barriers to advancing this agenda are formidable, we recommend that governments define common standards for value-based accounting; serve as information brokers for evidence development; pioneer value-based procurement of goods and services; engage in deliberative democracy in cancer care; and educate communities to facilitate knowledge sharing between communities of patients, their caretakers, and researchers.
Ryan Callahan (r.callahan@imperial.ac.uk) is the forum fellow for the Delivering Affordable Cancer Care Forum at the World Innovation Summit for Health (WISH) and a policy fellow at the Centre for Health Policy, Institute of Global Health Innovation, Imperial College London, in the United Kingdom.
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Ara Darzi is executive chair of WISH, Qatar Foundation, and director of the Institute of Global Health Innovation, Imperial College London.
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D017047:Cost Sharing / Q000379:methods; D017281:Cost of Illness; D003657:Decision Making; D019317:Evidence-Based Medicine; D005260:Female; D014943:Global Health / Q000191:economics*; D018166:Health Care Reform; D005102:Health Expenditures; D006291:Health Policy; D006301:Health Services Needs and Demand; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009369:Neoplasms / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000191:economics* / Q000453:epidemiology* / Q000628:therapy; D011050:Policy Making; D015995:Prevalence; D018570:Risk Assessment
Cancer care; Evidence-Based Medicine; Health Reform; Health Spending; International/global health studies