Evidence matters... of course it does!

Ruairi O’Donnell writes in the March 2012 issue of Pharmaceutical Market Europe that evidence matters.  Of course it does. And particularly in market access activities, which is the context he addresses in his article. Some of the points he makes are very good: about payers as a group being a variety of different types of people with different perspectives; about systematic literature reviews being a good place to start looking for comparative effectiveness data; about making a core economic model and adapting it to local conditions. Definitely agree.  And also about the “complicated, impenetrable spreadsheets raising uncertainties in a model’s robustness and contributing to negative decision-making” (sic).  Also agree.  But what about the communication of the evidence? This is addressed only in the last line of his article – the need for (and I quote again)

“innovative communications methods must be employed to facilitate payer decision-making”.

Well to me, as much as I agree with his precepts, I dislike the way they are communicated.  Couldn’t he have said: “complex models lower trust and encourage payers  to say no?” Or “use good communications to help healthcare decisions?”

Dressing it up, even as little as is done in O’Donnells article,  just makes the whole issue more difficult. End of rant.