Grant: Operating Grant: PHSI for Cancer Control - LOI

Drug costs represent a rapidly growing expense for public health care systems. In cancer care, the emergence of new treatments has become a regular occurrence and easily outpaces budget growth. As a result, provincial funders must use evidence to prioritize and fund selected drugs from the pipeline of new drugs awaiting funding. Our team believes that the prioritization process should not only consider the evidence for the drugs in the pipeline when allocating resources, but also for drugs that are already being funded. Decisions to fund these drugs would have been made based on controlled clinical trials, where the population or environment may not reflect practice in the "real world." The objective of this study is to develop a formal framework for the analysis of real-world evidence (RWE) on currently funded cancer drugs, which will enable Canadian cancer agencies to optimally distribute their drug budgets and verify they are receiving appropriate benefit (clinical, economic, etc.) from funded drugs. RWE will harness population-level data to capture all patients in a given jurisdiction, creating a more accurate picture of clinical benefit and cost-effectiveness, which is particularly important if patients are not benefiting to the extent that was originally expected. However, before cancer agencies can dedicate resources to RWE, there must be a consistent, validated process to analyze RWE. Our team will assemble a national panel of clinical, methodological, and policy experts to create adoptable RWE frameworks for cancer drug funding bodies. The frameworks and broad adoption of RWE will not only support evidence-based policy reform, price re-negotiations, and reallocation of funding from low- to high-value settings, but will also drive accountability and sustainability of the cancer system in an innovative way that can be replicated by all provinces and by other areas of the health care system.