The Case for Resource Sensitivity: Why It Is Ethical to Provide Cheaper, Less Effective Treatments in Global Health

Decrementally cost-effective health technologies in non-inferiority studies: A systematic review

Background: HTA guidance has generally been driven by situations where innovative and usually more expensive technologies are compared to the prevailing standards of care. Cheaper and less efficacious interventions have received scarce attention, although strategies with minimal individual efficacy losses might produce collective health gains when savings are redistributed. Purpose: This systematic review of health economic evaluations identified interventions that are both cost and outcome reducing to procure a list of candidate decrementally cost-effective technologies. Data Sources: English language searches were performed in PubMed, EMBASE and ClinicalTrials.gov covering 2005 to September 2021. Study Selection: Full economic evaluations reporting in English decrementally cost-effective health technologies based on RCT data, modelling or mixed methods. Data Synthesis: After filtering 4,975 studies found through the systematic database search, 107 decrementally cost-effective health technologies (HTs) were identified. Nearly a third were services (n = 29) and similarly for drugs (n = 31). For over half of the studies (n = 54) health outcomes were measured in QALYs and the cost-utility ratios varied from €140 to €5 million saved per QALY lost, albeit with time horizons varying from 4 days of follow-up to lifetime extrapolations. Less than a quarter of the studies were carried out from the societal perspective. Limitations: Despite including ClinicalTrials.gov as data source, unpublished studies may have been missed. Conclusions: Our results show a growth in recent years in the number of economic publications demonstrating decrementally cost-effective HTs. Economic tools are needed to facilitate the adoption of such HTs by policy-makers at the national level to maximise health outcomes at the population level. Systematic Review Registration: https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/display_record.php?RecordID=95504, identifier CRD42018095504.

Comparing direct acting antivirals for hepatitis C using observational data - Why and how?

The World Health Organisation's goal of hepatitis C virus (HCV) elimination by 2030 will require lower drug prices. Estimates of comparative efficacy promote competition between pharmaceutical companies but direct acting antivirals have been approved for the treatment of HCV without comparative trials. We emulated a randomized trial to answer the question of whether easy to treat patients with genotype 1 HCV could be treated with sofosbuvir/ledipasvir (SOF/LDV) rather than sofosbuvir/velpatasvir (SOF/VEL). Patients without comorbidities or end stage liver disease were selected from the British Colombia Hepatitis Testers Cohort. To create a conceptual trial, we matched each patient starting SOF/VEL (a ‘case’) to the patient starting SOF/LDV with the closest propensity score (a ‘control’). We estimated the probability of treatment failure under a Bayesian logistic model with a random effect for each case‐control set and used that model to give an estimate of a risk difference for the conceptual trial. Treatment failure was recorded for 27 of 825 (3%) cases and for 29 of 602 (5%) matched controls. Estimates from our model were treatment success rates of 97% (95% credible interval, CrI, 95%‐98%) for treatment with SOF/VEL, 95% (95% CrI 93%‐97%) for treatment with SOF/LDV and a risk difference between treatments of 2% (95% CrI 0%‐4%). This risk difference is evidence that SOF/LDV is not inferior to SOF/VEL for easy to treat patients with genotype 1 HCV. The approach is a template for comparing drugs when there are no data from comparative trials.

Parental manual ventilation in resource-limited settings: an ethical controversy

Lower respiratory tract infections are a leading cause of paediatric morbidity and mortality worldwide. Children in low-income countries are disproportionately affected. This is in large part due to limitations in healthcare resources and medical technologies. Mechanical ventilation can be a life-saving therapy for many children with acute respiratory failure. The scarcity of functioning ventilators in low-income countries results in countless preventable deaths. Some hospitals have attempted to adapt to this scarcity by using hand-bag ventilation, as either a bridge to a mechanical ventilator, or until clinical improvement occurs rendering mechanical ventilation no longer necessary. In instances of hand-bag ventilation, an endotracheal tube is first placed. Family members are then asked to play the role of a ventilator, manually compressing a bag repeatedly to inflate the child's lungs. This approach is fraught with numerous ethical challenges. A careful examination of the data and a nuanced approach to the ethical considerations are imperative. Ethical arguments in support of and in opposition to allowing parental hand-bag ventilation are explored, including the best interests of the child, the child's right to an open future, beneficence and parental protection, legitimising substandard care, and finally, contextual concerns. An algorithmic, potentially ethically permissible approach to parental participation in manual ventilation is proposed.

Urgently Creating the Better in Global Health

In this issue of the Hastings Center Report, Govind Persad and Ezekiel Emanuel argue that "[t]he provision of cheaper, less effective health care is frequently the most effective way of promoting health and realizing the ethical values of utility, equality, and priority to the worst off." I agree that we should not let the perfect get in the way of the good, but just providing cheaper, less effective treatment for utilitarian or other reasons is not a comprehensive approach to global health. In my experience as an on-the-ground global health practitioner, the choice is never that simple. As time passes, dynamics evolve, and so should the responses to a global health problem. The goal of global health should be urgently improving responses toward better access to care and equity in health, without which the good may become the enemy of the better. In other words, there are places and times in which the approach Persad and Emanuel describe may be appropriate, but their recommendations fail to account for the realities of a population-level medical emergency and for the fact that once an emergency is initially or partially addressed in any setting, time can be the enemy, if it breeds complacency.

The Pluralism of Coherent Approaches to Global Health

Stakeholders in global health, including governments, international and nongovernmental organizations, and corporations, face complex decisions about how to help improve the lives of those most burdened by sickness and disease while upholding their rights and facilitating the transition to a more just social and political order. In "The Case for Resource-Sensitivity: Why It Is Ethical to Provide Cheaper, Less Effective Treatments in Global Health," Govind Persad and Ezekiel Emanuel argue that "[t]he provision of health care in developing countries should reflect what best balances utility, equality, and priority to the least advantaged in those countries." This positive proposal faces several difficulties. For one thing, it is not clear that these are the only relevant values, and moreover, even if we assume that they are, we do not know what global health policies these values rule out because conflict between the values is pervasive.