Session (CTI)

Most countries in the Asia Pacific region have made significant progress in providing universal healthcare to the general population. However, universal healthcare has an intrinsic bias of allocating government funding towards sickness, and often cannot effectively manage preventive health nor rare diseases. This inevitably creates inequities between health versus care, those with access versus without access. For example, Japan’s national insurance is nearly entirely dedicated for hospital care, while preventative care such as health screening is managed at prefecture level with large variations across the prefectures. For nationally reimbursed services, several countries have patient co-payment policies usually adjusted for patients’ income level and age. However, it is not clear whether there are un-intended consequences on patients’ financial burden, or variations in health resource utilization across different diseases. This forum is designed to bring experts in both HEOR and policy development together aiming to first understand latest developments of methodologies that incorporate health equity in cost-effectiveness analysis; and then learn from case studies where HEOR have promoted health equity through evidence-informed policy development. Nathorn Chaiyakunapruk will provide an overview of top health equity issues around the Asia Pacific region, and opportunities to improve these issues in reference to other regions/countries that may have made progress. Stacey Kowal will present health equity indicators and discuss data and methods needed for incorporating health equity into cost-effectiveness analysis from the US and UK perspectives. Jing Wu will share case studies where health equity gaps are minimized through HEOR informed national policy development. Finally, the moderator will bring speakers together to discuss the challenges and promoters for varies stakeholders to consider when they start evidence-informed health equity initiatives in their country.