Fulfilling the Promise: Leveraging Payment Reform to Advance Patient Access to Transformative Treatments

Amid the ongoing debate over drug and medical device prices, payment, and patient access, an important need exists to demonstrate the value of new, innovative therapies and to develop payment models that ensure their availability to the patients that need them. 

On September 11, 2019, the Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy will convene a public workshop, “Fulfilling the Promise: Leveraging Payment Reform to Advance Patient Access to Transformative Treatments.” This public meeting will bring the stakeholder community together to explore the pipeline of medical breakthroughs, the limitations of the current volume-based payment system in accommodating these products, and the potential of value-based payment (VBP) arrangements to better align payment with value.

Participants will consider why demonstrating value in medical products is critical, albeit potentially difficult to achieve; circumstances that warrant VBP arrangements versus other pricing and payment strategies; mechanisms for enabling VBP models in the Medicare program; and recent efforts to implement population-based payment reform.

The public workshop is a part of the ongoing efforts of the Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy’s Value-Based Payment for Medical Products Consortium — a multi-stakeholder coalition composed of patient advocates, payers, manufacturers, and providers, as well as experts on regulatory affairs, law, and policy that are developing approaches to payment reform that support better outcomes for patients and better value across the system. The public workshop will help inform the current debate on drug and device pricing and payment as well as future policy recommendations and priorities for the Consortium and the Center.