Disagreement on cancer drug decisions in Europe

Abstract

ObjectivesDespite the efforts of the European Union (EU) to promote voluntary cooperation among Health Technology Assessment (HTA) agencies, different reimbursement decisions for the same drug are made across European countries. The aim of this paper is to compare the agreement of cancer drug reimbursement decisions using inter-rater reliability measures.MethodsThis study is based on primary data on 161 cancer drug reimbursement decisions from nine European countries from 2002 to 2014. To achieve our goal, we use two measures to analyze agreement, in other words, congruency: (i) percentage of agreement and (ii) the κ score.ResultsOne main conclusion can be drawn from the analysis. There is a weak to medium agreement among cancer drug decisions in the European countries analyzed (based on the percentage of agreement and the κ score). England and Scotland show the highest consistency between the two measures, showing a medium agreement. These results are in line with previous literature on the congruency of HTA decisions.ConclusionsThis paper contributes to the HTA literature, by highlighting the extent of weak to medium agreement among cancer decisions in Europe.