The broad societal value of pembrolizumab for women’s cancer in Canada

The impact of women’s cancers is multifaceted, with broad societal and economic consequences. Health technology assessments often rely solely on costs and outcomes directly relevant to the healthcare system. Our study incorporates the additional and novel value elements across three perspectives for pembrolizumab in four women’s cancers in a Canadian setting.
We analyzed the net monetary benefit (NMB) of pembrolizumab-based treatments of early-stage triple-negative breast cancer, metastatic triple-negative breast cancer, microsatellite instability-high endometrial cancer, and cervical cancer from three perspectives: traditional payer perspective (TPP), traditional societal perspective (TSP), and broad societal perspective (BSP). Indications and comparators were modeled independently, combined, and weighted by prevalence.
Pembrolizumab-based therapy generated an NMB over four times greater with the BSP (Canadian dollars, CAD$925,078), compared with TPP (CAD$226,090) and TSP (CAD$222,556). The largest driver of results was the inclusion of insurance value. Results excluding insurance value still generated an NMB of CAD$484,384, more than twice the TPP.
Broadening the perspective to include additional value elements considerably increased the overall value of treatment of women’s cancer compared with the TPP, indicating that the perspective used by health technology bodies may not fully capture the societal value of therapeutics.
The Value Of Treating Women’s Cancers In Canada – Traditionally, when people decide if a new treatment is valuable, they look at how much it helps the patient and how much it costs. Other things like how the caregiver feels, lost income, and extra costs that patients pay themselves are usually not included. Pembrolizumab is a medicine used to treat some cancers. It is used to treat triple-negative breast cancer, cervical cancer, and endometrial cancer. This paper looks at how decision makers judge the value of pembrolizumab and offers a new model to demonstrate how treating women’s cancers may be valuable for society as a whole.