The National Comprehensive Cancer Network tool will eventually go into healthcare-technology systems used by hospitals, including products from IBM Watson and McKesson.
”Reuters notes that “{d}octors developing the measures expect them to shift demand away from less effective treatments, influencing the prices drugmakers are able to charge. They say they are responding to the needs of patients who are having to pay much more for their own care, with higher health insurance premiums, co-payments and deductibles, and want to know the value of their treatments.”
Reuters says: “The NCCN scale, to be launched in a few weeks, will use ‘evidence blocks’ to assign a score of up to five points for each of five measures — price, effectiveness, safety, quality and consistency of clinical data. Initially, it will evaluate drugs used for multiple myeloma and chronic myeloid leukemia. Similar guidelines are expected for most other types of cancer by the end of 2016.”
