Introduction:Introduction: Patients' access to medicines can be profoundly affected by the decisions made by medicine licensing bodies and public reimbursement agencies. The present study compares access to licensed and subsidized medicines under a single-payer system in each of the US, the UK,...

In Germany, the Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) makes recommendations for ceiling prices of drugs based on an evaluation of the relationship between costs and effectiveness. To set ceiling prices, IQWiG uses the following decision rule: the incremental...

When going 'beyond the patient', to measure QALYs for unpaid carers, a number of additional methodological considerations and value judgements must be made. While there is no theoretical reason to restrict the measurement of QALYs to patients, decisions have to be made about which carers to...

The UK National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) invited the manufacturer of erlotinib (Roche) to submit evidence for the clinical and cost effectiveness of erlotinib as monotherapy for the maintenance treatment of patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and stable...

Background: Orphan medicinal products are designed to diagnose or treat rare diseases that are serious, life threatening or chronically debilitating and that affect 50 or fewer people in every 100 000 in the EU. In Belgium, the Drug Reimbursement Committee (DRC) evaluates reimbursement...

Background: Attempts to improve the acceptability of resource allocation decisions around new health technologies have spanned many years, fields and disciplines. Various theories of decision making have been tested and methods piloted, but, despite their availability, evidence of sustained...