Measuring Quality of Life

When developing drugs for a rare condition, groups need to consider which evidence will be required by health technology assessment bodies to ensure a smooth pathway for patient access. While demonstrating that a treatment has a significant impact on outcome measures assessed by clinicians is key for the success of clinical trials, it has become increasingly important to demonstrate a real impact on the lives and wellbeing of the patients themselves to ensure positive reimbursement decisions and access.

Capturing such data is more easily said than done. A number of standard tools exist which try to measure and quantify an individual’s quality of life. These can go some way to capturing the impact of a new treatment, but most measure a small number of variables, and fail to capture the subtleties that matter to a given rare disease patient population. Subsequently, many groups are now trying to devise more disease specific quality of life measures – tools designed to more accurately measure change in the outcomes that matter to their specific rare disease.

The development and validation of these tools is a significant challenge, but when done right they can offer exceptional insight into the disease state and wellbeing of rare disease patients.

What will you learn in this webinar?

• The ways to measure quality of life in rare diseases for the purpose of health technology assessment
• How patient organisations can get involved in the process.

This webinar was produced in collaboration with Healx.