Objectives of Cost Effective Analysis

EP: 1.Burden of C. Difficile and Novel Therapies

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EP: 2.Objectives of Cost Effective Analysis

EP: 3.Defining Standard of Care

EP: 4.Target Population In Analysis

EP: 5.Cost Inputs and Key Data from Analysis

EP: 6.Study Limitations and Relevance

Dr. Paul Feuerstadt: Michael, can you walk us through what the objectives were for this analysis and provide a study overview?

Dr. Michael Kobernick: …[So] I think the first question … is why do health [insurance] plans care about cost-effectiveness? I think we want to touch on that first and we have a fiduciary responsibility to the commercial, the employers, to Medicare when we’re managing Medicare and Medicare Advantage. So part of our work is to make sure that everybody’s healthcare dollars are spent wisely and so to that extent, we look carefully at clinical efficacy in the evaluation of treatments and to a lesser extent, but important extent, we look at cost and cost being related to value as I mentioned before, value being the relationship between cost and outcome. So here the question in the study was raised, is: Is this treatment, RBL, is this cost effective? In other words, does it have the ability to improve an outcome at a cost that is better than the alternative treatment? So the way we think of that in this study was the question really was, compared [with] the standard of care, is this a cost effective treatment? Does it cost less to give the treatment in light of the complications than it does to continue with the current standard of care? It’s not the clinical trial. Clinical trial, we’ve already proven the effectiveness of a medication. Really, this is a question that talks about the cost effectiveness because the downstream cost, as you were mentioning things, the complications of the recurrences are a significant cost.

Transcript is AI-generated and edited for clarity and readability.