The Health Law Ethics & Policy Workshop Series
presents
Niteesh K. Choudhry
Harvard Medical School
Could giving away prescription medications for free save ontario money?: empirical lessons from south of the border
Thursday, October 21, 2010
12:30 – 2:00
Faculty of Law, University of Toronto
84 Queen’s Park, Falconer Hall
Solarium (Room FA2)
Toronto, Ontario, M5S 2C5
Map
Everyone is welcome to attend, no registration is required.
ABSTRACT
Copayments, coinsurance, and other similar strategies are widely used to contain health care spending by encouraging patients to consume only those services with benefits greater than their costs. While patient cost sharing helps to address the problem of “moral hazard” (i.e. overconsumption) that may result from insurance coverage, patients may also reduce their use highly effective services because of misperceptions about value. Numerous examples of this phenomenon have been documented in the literature. The cost of preventable illness arising from this underuse may paradoxically contribute to overall increases in health spending.
An alternative approach is to reduce patient cost-sharing for medications (and other therapies) that provide high benefits relative to their costs. This strategy is known as evidence-based plan design or value-based insurance design (VBID) and has attracted substantial attention in the U.S. as a means to simultaneously improve health care quality and reduce the growth of overall health care expenditure.
This seminar will review the literature supporting the setting of copayments based on value (as opposed to cost) and describe the design of a soon-to-be-completed randomized health policy experiment in which cost-sharing was eliminated for cardiovascular medications. More generally, I will discuss how rigorous empirical evidence can inform health policy decision-making and highlight the unique opportunities that large health care systems, like Ontario’s, have to use such empirical methods to improve the quality and reduce the cost of the health care it provides.
BIOGRAPHY
Niteesh K. Choudhry, MD, PhD, is an internist and health services researcher whose work focuses on the clinical and economic consequences of evidence-based therapies for the management of common chronic conditions and barriers to treatment access and adherence. He is particularly interested in the impact of financial incentives and medication costs on health care quality and spending. Among his current projects is the Post-MI Free Rx and Event and Economic Evaluation (FREEE) trial, which is a large randomized policy trial evaluating the impact of providing medications without cost-sharing to patients who have had a myocardial infarction. This study builds on economic models he has built demonstrating the potential benefits of eliminating cost-sharing for therapies of proven efficacy. He has conducted numerous other studies evaluating the cost-effectiveness and economic impact of commonly used medical technologies.
Dr. Choudhry is an Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School and Associate Physician in the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics and the Hospitalist Program at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He attended McGill University, received his M.D. and completed his residency training in Internal Medicine at the University of Toronto and then served as Chief Medical Resident for the Toronto General and Toronto Western Hospitals. He did his Ph.D. in Health Policy at Harvard University, with a concentration in statistics and the evaluative sciences, and was a Fellow in Pharmaceutical Policy Research at Harvard Medical School.
A light lunch will be served.
For further information or to access the seminar series schedule go to: www.law.utoronto.ca/visitors_content.asp?itemPath=5/7/0/0/0&contentId=211
or email Melissa at m.casco@utoronto.ca
