Will the Minister provide an update on the feasibility of an outcome-based payment for cancer medicines?
The powers to determine arrangements for pricing branded medicines are reserved by the UK Government. Branded medicine prices are regulated by the UK Voluntary Pricing and Access Scheme (VPAS) which began in January 2019 and ends in December 2023. For manufacturers opting out of VPAS, prices are set in accordance with a statutory scheme.
The VPAS provides for manufacturers to enter into commercial arrangements to ensure the NHS achieves the best value from medicines. These include a range of options from the offer of a straightforward discount to more complex commercial access schemes which can include elements of outcome based payment. Normally complex schemes are only available to medicines that would be expected to have value propositions at or below the lower end of the standard NICE cost effectiveness threshold range, with greater flexibilities made available for value propositions at even greater levels of cost effectiveness.
There remain significant challenges to widespread implementation of outcome based pricing. These include the availability of high quality data to support such transactions and the challenging of attributing outcomes to the use of a medicine alone when in practice, a medicine is used in combination with other therapies as part of a patient’s overall treatment