Value-Based Healthcare in Practice: IDEATE, a Collaboration to Design and Test an Outcomes-Based Agreement for a Medicine in Wales

The design of an OBA is a complex process that requires a multi-disciplinary approach. By assessing solutions to data, outcomes and contracting challenges, IDEATE provides a strong foundation for future success of OBAs in the UK. Outcome-based agreements (OBAs) are a way to pay for medicines if they help patient health in a specific way over time. These agreements can make it faster for people to get new medicines, but they also have challenges, like needing a lot of time and effort to manage them. A team from the NHS Wales, life sciences, and Swansea University created Project IDEATE to find a better way to design OBAs and solve some of these problems. Welsh datasets were used to create a new breast cancer dataset to test different OBAs and see how payments would change. A breast cancer treatment was used for the project. The project had 99 patients who got the medicine (2017-2020) and 286 patients who had breast cancer but did not get the medicine (2014-2016). Three health outcomes were measured: (1) living for one year after treatment, (2) patients needing to stop the medicine, and (3) days spent in care. The main OBA option we tested used all three health outcomes; the more the outcomes improved, the more the payments could go up until they hit the highest amount agreed. The analysis showed that the way an OBA is designed can make a big difference in how stable or risky it is, especially if one of the health outcomes has only two options. Project IDEATE showed that making an OBA can be hard, but when people from different fields work together, they can overcome many challenges and succeed.