Grant: Fellowship Award - Ontario Drug Policy

Cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) is a way of assessing the value for money of different health care interventions, including drugs. The result of a CEA is the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) which indicates the extra cost for each additional improvement in health outcome. CEAs help decision makers decide how best to spend limited health care resources. An expansion of new, expensive cancer therapies in recent years has strained health care budgets and forced policy-makers to make difficult funding decisions. CEAs are used to inform spending decisions in oncology and allow comparison among a variety of prevention and treatment options by simultaneously comparing costs and health outcomes like survival. In this way, the most efficient therapies can be prioritized for funding. The proposed research will use administrative databases to assess the effect of investment in new cancer drugs on costs and health outcomes, as well as calculate the real-world value of investing in new cancer drugs. The information obtained from real-world data will provide additional guidance to decision makers at the Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care as they confront difficult decisions about funding new, expensive cancer drugs.