PhF Frontier Award Recipient Publishes Patient-Centered Protocol for Value Assessment Study

When assessing the value of health care interventions such as medicines, the focus usually centers on costs and clinical benefits, while the other factors important to patients and their family caregivers are often overlooked.

The PhRMA Foundation is dedicated to supporting patient-centered value assessment and health outcomes research that is rigorous and transparent and addresses the needs of all health care stakeholders — especially patients.

Surachat Ngorsuraches, PhD, associate professor of Health Outcomes Research and Policy at the Auburn University Harrison College of Pharmacy, received a $500,000 PhRMA Foundation Frontier Award to support his efforts to meaningfully engage patients and caregivers in the Deep South in his research evaluating the value of multiple sclerosis (MS) therapies.

Ngorsuraches recently published his study protocol in the journal PharmacoEconomics Open, describing his patient-centered framework for conducting a multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA), an approach that helps identify and weigh multiple factors important to stakeholders like patients and caregivers, including nontraditional measures of value.

“The engagement of patients and their family caregivers in value assessment is even more critical for costly treatments with disparities in health outcomes, such as disease-modifying therapies for multiple sclerosis, that require increased effort to better understand the role of social determinants of health in racial and ethnic health disparities,” the authors write.

The paper outlines how Ngorsuraches and his team will invite 40 patients with MS and their family caregivers from Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi to participate and provide them with education around value assessment and MCDA. “Unlike previous studies that only briefly inform or prepare participants before the MCDA process, in this study, we will provide basic value assessment trainings for patients and family caregivers to ensure they can effectively engage throughout the patient-centered MCDA process,” the authors write. “We expect this study will demonstrate that the patient-centered MCDA approach is feasible and likely leads to improved patients’ and family caregivers’ engagement in value assessment.”

“We hope this study will amplify the often-overlooked patient voices in the Deep South and lead to the application of the patient-centered MCDA in the value assessments of other treatments and interventions in these states and across the country,” Ngorsuraches said.

Read the paper: Using a Patient-Centered Multicriteria Decision Analysis to Assess the Value of Multiple Sclerosis Treatments in the US: A Study Protocol.