NEHI Member Briefing: Patients and Health Care Payers: How should they communicate with each other when novel therapies are approved?

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved dozens of novel drugs recently and, by most estimates, dozens more will be approved in the years ahead. Many promise to be transformative, even curative therapies for serious unmet medical needs. Some also trigger complex and difficult decision-making on coverage by health care payers concerning the cost of new therapies and the depth of evidence supporting their use.

With support from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), NEHI convenes patient and health care payer leaders to identify principles of trustworthy communication regarding decision-making on coverage of novel therapies. In this briefing, NEHI Vice President of Policy Research Tom Hubbard presents results from the project, with comments from three experts: 

• Jennifer Graff, PharmD, Senior Director of Professional Affairs at the Academy of Managed Care Pharmacy
• Annie Kennedy,  Chief of Policy and Advocacy at the EveryLife Foundation for Rare Disease,
• Donna Messner, PhD

The NEHI project on patient-payer communication is supported by a Patient Engagement Award (Project EAIN 19981) from the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI).