7.14.2011

First Global HE, Pricing and Market Access compensation and benefits survey closing soon...

Folks,

I would like to remind you to check out the salary survey.. so far with the joint effort of Patti from healtheconomics.com and I we have hit the 200 responder mark today! It will be quite some work to shuffle through the data therefeore I would like to close that survey by the end of July in order to do some stats and writing up of the top line results during the upcoming travels in August.. so who has not participated, or has but has not yet encouraged friends and colleagues, please do so - it is of course entirely anonymous.

Here the initial post with the link to the survey again.

Many thanks and happy holidays to those already somewhere at the beach or in the montains.

Cheers
Ulf

Jeroen Luyten is this year’s winner of Pfizer’s European HTAcademy scholarship of €40,000

Amsterdam, July 5, 2011 – Jeroen Luyten, a PhD student at the University of Antwerp in Belgium, was selected this year’s winner of the European HTAcademy scholarship by an independent expert committee – in tough competition with Dutch and German national winners. His research project aims to investigate the moral relevance of medical effectiveness and intangible costs for the societal valuation of QALY-gains; dimensions that are so far under-explored within the QALY framework. Mentor for this project is Professor Philippe Beutels of the Centre for Health Economics Research and Modelling Infectious Diseases at the University of Antwerp.


From left: Clare McGrath, Pfizer, Jeroen Luyten, HTAcademy European Scholarship winner and Professor Maarten J. Postma, Chairman of the European Expert Committee

The HTAcademy aims to promote the further development of Health Technology Assessment (HTA) as an important tool for the systematic evaluation of healthcare technologies by supporting up-and-coming scholars in the HTA field. The European HTAcademy scholarship of €40,000 is awarded once a year for the realization of the winning research proposal. National level winners receive a travel stipend of €5,000–€10,000. The HTAcademy is sponsored by Pfizer Ltd.

Runners-up

Dr. Barbara Buchberger of the University Duisburg-Essen was the winner of the German HTAcademy scholarship 2011/12. Her project proposal entitled “Descriptive and analytic comparison of component systems for the assessment of interventional studies” aims to research quality assessment tools (QAT) used to test the internal validity of single interventional studies. Supporting this work is Professor Jürgen Wasem of the Institute for Health Care Management and Research at the University of Duisberg-Essen.

The Dutch HTAcademy expert committee selected Reina de Kinderen, a PhD student at the University of Maastricht, this year’s national winner. Her research project aims to explore differences between condition-specific and generic instruments for health valuation in epilepsy; hypothesized to be lower due to the non-constant health state of epilepsy patients. Mentor for this project is Dr. Silvia Evers of the University of Maastricht.



HTAcademy national winners: Barbara Buchberger, Reina de Kinderen and Jeroen Luyten

About HTAcademy

Pfizer’s annual HTAcademy scholarship program aims to support graduates at the start of their academic careers who want to contribute to the further development and application of HTA concepts. Eligible candidates may come from, for example, the fields of medicine, health sciences, health economics, psychology or medical ethics. The European scholarship of €40,000 is awarded to the candidate with the most promising research proposal, as selected by an independent expert committee. Eligible candidates for the European scholarship are the national level HTAcademy scholarship winners; each awarded a travel stipend of €5,000 – €10,000. For the cycle 2011/12, applications from Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland were accepted. The European expert committee is chaired by Dr. Maarten J. Postma, Professor of Pharmacoeconomics at the University of Groningen.

Further information about the HTAcademy scholarship program and contact details can be found at www.htacademy.eu

7.08.2011

Lilly CEO Calls for Improved Dialogue in Germany Between Industry and the Government and Health Care System

from www.lilly.com

Speech to Federation of German Industries Conference focuses on Germany's legacy as a pharmaceutical powerhouse and the need for greater collaboration and communication to advance medical innovation


BERLIN, July 7, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- In an address to the Federation of German Industries Conference in Germany today, John C. Lechleiter, Ph.D., chairman, president and chief executive officer of Eli Lilly and Company, offered to help build a new level of trust between the biopharmaceutical industry and government health care regulators. Lechleiter said collaboration can harness innovation to help meet growing health care demands within increasingly constrained budgets, create an environment where biopharmaceutical innovation can thrive, and achieve victories on behalf of the people who are counting on medical advances to live longer healthier lives.

Lechleiter, who in 2012 will serve as the chairman of PhRMA, the U.S.-based association of global pharmaceutical research and biotechnology companies, noted that Germany is the third-largest market in the world for most of the industry, including Lilly.

"Although Lilly is based in the U.S., we have deep roots here in Germany and enormous respect for this country's legacy as a pharmaceutical powerhouse," said Lechleiter. "However, in no other place in the world has the environment for innovative pharmaceuticals changed more in the last 12 months than it has in Germany." He noted that "recent health care reforms are jeopardizing the country's legacy of pharmaceutical innovation," but added: "At the same time, I see Germany as a place where the pharmaceutical industry can achieve a breakthrough — a fresh start if you will — to develop more constructive and collaborative relationships."

Lechleiter said government and industry are on the same side in the fight against disease. "We are collaborators, not competitors. We need to work together in a spirit of openness and trust, and our industry bears responsibility for helping to build — or rebuild — that trust."

To open the dialogue, Lechleiter discussed recent health care reforms in Germany that have created barriers for innovation. He cited action last year by the German government to freeze prices for pharmaceuticals already in the market and to increase significantly the mandatory rebates that industry must pay to the health system on sales of its products. As well, in a law known by its German acronym AMNOG, parliament imposed a complex new regulatory mechanism to assess the added benefit of new pharmaceutical products entering the German market, linking future net prices to the outcomes of this assessment.

"No other country in the world has a set of requirements quite like those imposed by AMNOG. The potential effects are serious: launches of new medicines that can benefit patients delayed or withdrawn, erosion of Germany's strength in pharmaceutical innovation, and the loss of high-paying jobs in research and development."

He said that AMNOG proposes to determine the value of a medicine in "a wholly unnatural way: at the time it is launched in the market, before any real-world experience with the new product is available." In addition, he said, the understanding of innovation reflected in German regulation fails to account for the full value of innovation, with too much short-term focus on holding down costs "by imposing impossible standards on new treatments that some of the most effective medicines of the past never would have met."

"Given that AMNOG is now the framework we have for assessing the value of new medicines," he said, "I believe it's vitally important to find ways within that framework to allow patients and the health care system to benefit from pharmaceutical innovation." He suggested, for example, that "the 'Early Assessment' could be used not to define the potential of a new medicine as low as possible to save money, but rather to take a comprehensive view of its potential value for patients."

Lechleiter will be in Germany for the next 7 days meeting with government officials, members of parliament, and regulators to make a case for greater dialogue and trust between industry and health care regulators. "For companies like Lilly to make the enormous investments necessary to develop new medicines, we need predictability and certainty in the regulatory process that will determine whether or not those medicines will ever reach patients. We in industry are prepared to work with regulators to help define clear, transparent, and workable approaches to regulation, and we want to work in the same way with health care policy makers to lay out the process that determines the value of innovation."

"We're on the same side in this fight. We have a common enemy — disease, disability, and premature death," said Lechleiter. "And we have a common interest in the only means by which our health system can help more people live longer and healthier within constrained budgets — and that's innovation."

"I know I speak for colleagues in the biopharmaceutical industry when I say that we seek a regular, open, and structured dialogue in Germany with the government and the health care system," Lechleiter concluded.