An empirical study looking at the potential impact of increasing cost-effectiveness threshold on reimbursement decisions in Thailand

Background

There has been lots of debate regarding an appropriate value of cost-effectiveness threshold (CET). To our knowledge, Thailand is the only country which has explicit CET and has increased the CET. Therefore, Thailand is in a unique position to help answer the question of what happened when CET was increased. The study objectives were to explore the impact of increasing CET on the submitted medicine price by industry and the decision to be included in the National List of Essential Medicine in Thailand.

Methods

Retrospective secondary data analyses were conducted using data from economic evaluation reports being reviewed by the National Drug Subcommittee. In total, 55 reports were included in the analysis, which represented 295 observations as each report could have more than one medicine for different indication and/or target population. The intervention of interest was the change in CET policy from 100,000 THB/QALY in 2008 to 120,000 THB/QALY in 2010 to 160,000 THB/QALY in 2013.

Results

There is no evidence suggesting the increase in CET affected the submitted medicine prices (price change=19%, p-value=0.457) or increased the likelihood of a positive reimbursement decision (OR=1.596, p-value=0.532). There were other factors which may influence medicine prices and reimbursement decision.

Conclusions

The change in the CET did not significantly affect health resource allocation. The findings do not support whether the current CET value in Thailand should be increased. Future research should continue to monitor the submission and re-analyse the current work as more data become available using both quantitative and qualitative approaches.