As we mentioned in Chapter 1, those of us who live in the United States receive many benefits from the current drug development process. Some of these are:
- We gain access to lots of new drugs.
- We can feel confident in rigorous safety testing.
- We cure or mitigate new diseases that didn’t previously have effective therapies.
- We can have confidence that ineffective drugs will be pulled off the market.
- Our overall healthcare costs are driven down by keeping people out of hospitals
- We enjoy increased life expectancy, productivity, and healthy years.
How can we measure the value of new medicines? Watch this 3-minute video which introduces the concept of the Value Flower for calculating the answer.