Value in healthcare: empirical exploration and application (UIP-2019-04-3721)

About the project manager:

Ana Bobinac PhD is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Economics and Business. Before joining the University of Rijeka, she was employed at the Institute for Health Policy and Management (iBMG) Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, as a doctoral student (2007-2012), postdoc (2012-2014) and assistant professor ( 2014-2016) in the field of Health economics.

Dr. Bobinac received her master's degree (2006) and doctorate (2012) in the field of Health economics at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam. She received an award from the Dutch Society for Health Technology Assessment for the best paper published by a young researcher in the field of health technology assessment in the Netherlands. In 2013, Dr. Bobinac received a prestigious three-year VENI grant from the Dutch science foundation, and she led several competitive scientific projects, including projects financed by the Croatian science foundation and the European Social Fund. Dr. Bobinac's main research interests include drug policy, methodology of economic evaluations of health technologies, and evaluation of health outcomes. She has published 20 scientific and professional papers in the most influential journals in the field of health economics, such as Journal of Health Economics, Health economics, Medical decision making and others.

The question of which health technologies to finance from a limited budget has important implications for society. Economic assessments of health technologies can help decision makers identify technologies that produce relatively more health benefits at a given level of cost, i.e. identify interventions with higher cost-effectiveness and thus maximize the level of health benefits resulting from a limited budget. This research proposal aims to (1) improve the methodology of economic evaluations and contribute to the correct interpretation of the results of economic evaluations of health technologies (by estimating the monetary value of a unit of health benefit in the Croatian population); (2) deal with the issue of financing expensive new drugs that bring small health benefits at astronomical prices (investigating population preferences about the value of small health benefits at the end of a patient's life, as well as the acceptability of the relationship between costs and effects of particularly expensive oncology drugs) (3) apply new a pricing system that ties drug prices to the value they generate in different sub-populations and show its impact on the budget of the Croatian Health Insurance Institute. For this purpose, we will apply methods for examining preferences (contingent assessment and discrete choice experiment) in a large representative sample of the Croatian public, as well as apply modeling techniques to determine whether and under what conditions value-based pricing can lead to a reduction in the price of expensive drugs. Given that the project deals with the very current issues of funding medicines in Croatia, it offers young researchers knowledge that can later be very directly applied in practice.