How Time is Accounted for when Modeling Pharmaceutical Impacts: Investment vs. Assessment Perspectives

Abstract Bringing a drug to market requires different stakeholders including patients, researchers, investors, drug developers, manufacturers, regulators, and health technology assessment bodies. Each has an important role in the biopharmaceutical innovation ecosystem while representing their own unique perspective and working toward their own objectives. In this commentary, we explore the differing perspectives of two of these stakeholders—health technology investors and health technology assessment bodies. We focus on these two players because using resources optimally to improve population health (and thus well-being) is top of mind for both health technology investment and assessment. Still, they represent different perspectives, operate at different stages of development, use different quantitative tools, make different assumptions over time, and thus can come to different—and at times conflicting—conclusions. Finding alignment in areas where it makes sense, such as how time is accounted for in their respective modeling efforts, may promote their shared goals of maximizing the returns from spending and using scarce resources to most efficiently improve population health.