Survey finds variability in MS treatment preferences among individual patients, and among stakeholder groups

WESTPORT, CT--(Marketwired - January 31, 2017) - Real Endpoints, LLC (RE), a data and analytics firm focusing on assessing and quantifying pharmaceutical value, has just completed an extensive literature review and survey to tease out how different stakeholder groups assess the value of current multiple sclerosis (MS) therapies.¹

Key findings of the literature review and survey are two-fold:

• Providers and payers value MS therapies differently than people treated for MS and
• People with MS often view the value of MS therapies differently than each other.

Conclusions

Preliminary results of the survey and literature review indicate that population-level judgments of value may not capture the variability in preferences and treatment effect among individual MS patients, payers and physicians (further research should be done to confirm these findings). Additionally, potential disparity may exist between judgments of value used at the payer level to determine coverage of MS treatments, and what MS patients would define as valuable in their own treatment decision-making.

This variability should be taken into account in healthcare decision-making, on the payer, provider and patient level. Furthermore, any tool, such as a value framework, used to quantify the value of an MS treatment should transparently define the differences in preferences and treatment goals.

Key Findings

• Multiple sclerosis patients define value differently than payers and physicians. For example: patients ascribe highest value to a drug's effect on MS symptoms (such as fatigue and walking difficulty) relative to other attributes around a drug's efficacy; payers and physicians are more concerned with disease progression, effect on relapse rate and effect on severity of relapses.
• Overall, patients were more concerned about a drug's safety characteristics (e.g., severity of side-effects, interactions with other medications) than were payers or physicians.
• In the economic realm, patients were far more concerned with out-of-pocket costs than payers, who were primarily concerned about the drug's effect on healthcare services needed to treat MS.
• Patient preferences were highly diverse. In most categories, patient opinions were more varied than those of either physicians or payers.
• MS is difficult to treat and remains a poorly understood, extremely varied disease whose course, or treatment response, is difficult to predict in an individual patient.

Background & Methodology

A team of trained academic and non-academic clinicians and researchers reviewed over 300 research articles from scientific literature around disease heterogeneity, patient preference, and disease economics in multiple sclerosis.

To solicit response on stakeholder preferences in MS treatment 90 individuals were surveyed including thirty people diagnosed with MS, 30 payers, and 30 neurologists who treat MS.

The survey was based upon RE's RxScorecard™ drug-value assessment framework, a fully transparent, evidence-based tool that comparatively "scores" drugs that treat a particular disease.

Detailed documentation will be released in the near future, including full synthesis and reporting of collected survey data and literature review, description of methodology, and incorporation of findings into RxScorecard and potentially other frameworks to help transparently define value from the points of view of multiple stakeholders, including patients, physicians and payers.

About Real Endpoints

Real Endpoints (RE) is a healthcare information and analytics company that prepares healthcare providers, payers and pharmaceutical companies for the value-based healthcare economy. For information contact Viviana Ramos at vramos@realendpoints.com.

Learn more at www.realendpoints.com

¹ The project was funded by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA).