Using a patient-centered value assessment to optimize fair prices for Inflation Reduction Act's Medicare Drug Price Negotiation Program.

Abstract

In the United States, various federal agencies, institutions, and foundations, including the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), have supported the incorporation of patient perspective in health care decision-making. Despite a series of patient-focused listening sessions planned as part of the Inflation Reduction Act's Medicare Drug Price Negotiation Program, the details of these sessions in the guidance developed by CMS remain unclear. CMS has not specified how patients' inputs will be used to determine the maximum fair prices (MFPs) of selected drugs for the first round of the negotiations. In this Viewpoint article, we urge CMS to use patient-centered value assessment methods to optimize MFPs in the Medicare Drug Price Negotiation Program. We focused on a stated preference method, the discrete choice experiment, which has been increasingly used to determine patient preferences and patient's willingness to pay for drugs. We discussed an example using a discrete choice experiment as a patient-centered method to assess the value of Jardiance and optimize its MFP in the negotiation program.