Xinyue Dong, PhD candidate, School of Pharmaceutical Science and Technology, Tianjin University, Tianjin, China
Yan Feng, PhD, Senior Lecturer, Queen Mary Univeristy of London, the UK
Xiaoning He, PhD, Associate Professor, School of Pharmaceutical Science and Technology, Tianjin University, Tianjin, China
Jing Wu, PhD, Professor, School of Pharmaceutical Science and Technology, Tianjin University, and Vice President of ISPOR Beijing Chapter, Tianjin, China
The first seminar of 2022 China Young Scholars Pharmacoeconomics Forum, themed “Application of Frontier Methods and Policies”, was held online on 11th March 2022. Hosted by Pharmacoeconomics Commision of Chinese Pharmaceutical Association, Pharmacoeconomics Commision of Chinese Research Hospital Association, and Tianjin University, the seminar was chaired by Gordon G. Liu, the PKU Yangtze River Scholar Professor of Economics at Peking University’s National School of Development, Director of the PKU China Center for Health Economic Research, and President of ISPOR Beijing Chapter.
The topic of this seminar focused on the pay-for-performance incentives for specialised services in England.
Prof. Gordon G. Liu delivered an opening speech and warmly welcomed the keynote speaker Dr. Yan Feng, a Senior Lecturer in Health Economics at Queen Mary Univeristy of London, UK. Dr. Yan Feng started her presentation with the background of introducing the first national pay-for-performance incentive program for specialised services, Prescribed Specialised Services Commissioning for Quality and Innovation (PSS CQUIN), in the UK National Health Service (NHS). The program was introduced in 2013 with the aim of incentivizing hospital providers to improve the quality of specialised care and achieve good value for money. Between financial years 2016/17 and 2018/19, £900 million was budgeted for the PSS CQUIN incentive payments. Dr. Feng led a research team to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of the PSS CQUIN incentive program.
In the second part of the presentation, Dr. Feng talked through the evaluation study for the PSS CQUIN program, which was funded in England by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) and the Policy Research Program (Reference number PR-R18-0117-22001). The project team included eight researchers from a consortium of Universities/Research Insutites in England. The project adopted a mixed methods approach including quantitative and qualitative analysis. During the study period, the research team kept the policy makers at NHS England informed about the lastest empirical evidence from evaluating the ongoing PSS CQUIN program to support their contract design for the new contract rounds. The team also contributed lessons learned from the implementation of the PSS CQUIN program which are informative for future design and/or implementation of pay-for-performance incentives in health care. The study was successfully completed in December 2021. Peer-review journal articles from this study are being finalized.
This online seminar attracted around 500 participants from Chinese governmental authorities, health care organizations, private pharmaceutical companies, and academic institutions. Participants showed strong interest in the seminar through active online discussions with the speaker during the Q&A session.
This series of webinars under the China Young Scholars Pharmacoeconomics Forum provides an interactive learning and communication platform for discussions on key areas of healthcare reform in China. In addition, the forum plays an important role to inform policy makers in China on the latest methodological research and empirical evidence in Pharmacoeconomics around the world to better support decision making on health policies. The forum also aims to enhance research collaborations in China and internationally in the fields of health policy design and implementation.