Demonstrate the Full Value of Your Medicines


ICER’s mission is to help the US health system better balance fair pricing and fair access, while maintaining sufficient incentives for future innovation. To do so, we engage with life sciences organizations in a good-faith and unbiased effort to understand and highlight your medicines’ clinical benefits and its other important contextual considerations.

Even as the US health system grapples with how to improve care with a finite amount of financial resources, it is crucial that we continue to encourage the kinds of transformative pharmaceutical innovation every patient desires. ICER’s recommended price benchmarks are scaled to each treatment’s ability to improve patients’ lives and reduce downstream medical costs — so that therapies that demonstrate significant benefits can reap handsome financial rewards, and that the health system doesn’t overpay for the therapies that aren’t as helpful. There are instances when our reviews have been used to demonstrate the fairness of a drug’s price (even, at times, very high prices), and we encourage US payers to simplify and broaden patient access to these therapies. And there are other instances when we’ve concluded that a drug’s net price would need to be lowered to more appropriately align with how well it improves patients’ lives; overpaying for these drugs, even if some patients benefit, can do more harm than good for patients across the health system by disproportionately increasing the overall costs of health care and health insurance.

While ICER’s core expertise lies in evidence synthesis, comparative effectiveness research, and cost-effectiveness modeling, each of our assessments also relies on outside experts who focus on the specific disease being studied, the available therapeutic options, and the clinical outcomes that matter most. These experts comprise clinical specialists, patient advocates, and obviously, the companies that have developed the treatments under review.

We encourage manufacturers to engage with us early and often. We notify pharmaceutical companies five weeks before announcing our intention to assess one of their treatments, we request any clinical and real-world data that may complement our own literature reviews, we consult with them as we develop the scope of our assessment, we seek their feedback throughout multiple drafts of our reports, and we invite them to provide their perspective at our public meetings.

For more detailed information about this process, see ICER’s complete Manufacturer Engagement Guide.