ICER Aims to Consider Health Equity in Its Product Value Assessments

The Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER plans to take health equity into account in its product value assessments and has come up with some ideas for how to do that.

ICER convened an advisory group made up of patient advocates, payers, health technology and policy experts to help identify ways to evaluate diversity of patients in clinical trials and the opportunities to reduce health disparities.

In a new white paper that draws on the group’s discussions, ICER looks at health technology assessment (HTA) “through an equity lens and proposes key methods through which HTA can support society’s goal of improving health equity for racial, ethnic, and other socially disadvantaged groups.”

ICER updates its Value Assessment Framework — which is the basis for conducting all its cost-benefit analyses — every three years and it plans to release an update later this year. “As a part of that, we will consider how we can incorporate the recommendations from [the white paper] into our updated framework,” an ICER spokesperson said.