On the Ground at ISPOR 2023

Insights and Takeaways from the COTA Team…

Last week, a wide variety of healthcare stakeholders gathered in Boston for ISPOR 2023 – the annual meeting to advance the science and practice of health economics and outcomes research (HEOR) around the world.

COTA was well represented with eight team members in attendance. If you did not attend (or even if you did) here are some of their takeaways:

“Attendance was larger than pre-COVID days - which says a lot. Real-world data and evidence is top of mind and everyone is exploring its use for regulatory support. I had many conversations around value-based care as the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is looming”

“I had many discussions around ECAs, best practices, and regulatory acceptance. Also there were a significant number of sessions/publications on how to measure value (beyond just cost) of novel treatments for oncology or treatments for rare diseases”

“There was a lot of buzz about linking data, specifically oncology data, because it is a gap for many core data owners. There were many questions about leveraging RWD in clinical trial programs for ECAs and contextualization”

“There was a good amount of brainstorming with partners to figure out their strategy in the IRA world, whether it's accelerating clinical trials or focusing on populations that are either more targeted or have higher unmet need”

“I attended several presentations on race-driven health disparities in prostate and breast cancer. It was also great to contribute to the dialogue about using RWE to support approvals and reimbursement”

Also at the conference, Roche Diagnostics and the University of Washington presented research that illustrates how real-world data (RWD) from COTA can uncover meaningful patterns in biomarker testing for early-stage non-small cell lung cancer (eNSCLC), the most common type of lung cancer.

The research team used COTA’s deidentified RWD database to examine a cohort of 1,031 patients diagnosed with eNSCLC between 2011 and 2021. They found that overall, 74.1% received any type of biomarker test within six months of diagnosis. But the distribution of testing was far from uniform. In 2011, just 55.3% of patients received a biomarker test. By 2021, that number had risen to 88.1%, tracking with the greater availability and lower cost of testing over time.

The study suggests that biomarker testing is reaching a high number of early-stage NSCLC patients, but it doesn’t dive into details about what types of patients are getting tested more often or which care settings are conducting the most tests. Future research may be required to further develop a comprehensive picture of biomarker testing among lung cancer patients, but the abstract provides a strong starting point for identifying testing patterns in this population.

Learn more about this research.