Drawing on a pragmatist approach to pricing this article discusses the impact of costeffectiveness analysis in the pricing strategies of pharmaceutical companies. Through an analysis of the human papillomavirus vaccination, this article illustrates the strategic appropriation of evidence based medicine (narratives and practices) that pharmaceutical companies have undertaken to enhance the value of their products. While governments are concentrated on the measurement of costs and efficiency (cost-effectiveness), companies attempt to find the threshold of effectiveness that supports their estimation of value. I have called such mode of calculation, price-effectiveness. Pharmaceutical companies engage in different ways with cost-effectiveness analysis in devising their own price strategies. First, cost-effectiveness analysis is used as an instrument to raise HPV vaccines as a matter of interest for health authorities. Second, companies produce models to maximise the effectiveness of their products. Third, the expense side of cost-effectiveness analysis has opened an opportunity to represent some conditions as diseases in order to increase the potential value of the vaccine, expressed in a higher price. Debates and practices of pricing offer a unique opportunity to trace how particular forms of quantification have become the common ground in the demonstration of value in healthcare and the adaptation of companies.
Precariousness of the Colombian urban economy provides an ecosystem for the development and expansion of digital platforms, intersecting informal working relations with digital surveillance. Reconstructing legal obstacles to gaining recognition as legal and formal workers, it is argued that platforms have assembled a techno-legal network which translates discussions about workers’ rights into the less regulated arena of information and communication technologies. The role of ‘regulatory displacement’ is examined to analyse the evolution of digital platforms for food delivery workers. Drawing on a review of the regulation of it and labour, discussed in Congress in 2017–2018, we explore the regulatory expulsions that digital workers experience, analysing this information with a grounded theory approach, in which we have followed discursive patterns that emerge from legal documents. Addressing this strategic use of the law is key to understanding and overcoming obstacles that platform workers face in their attempts to organize in the Global South.
Cost-eff ectiveness analysis is a strategy of calculation whose main objective is to compare for making decisions about the best, the most effi cient solution (costs vs benefi ts) to a particular problem. Costeff ectiveness analysis not only provides a framework to compare healthcare interventions which in practice seem incommensurable; it also performs a set of assumptions regarding the nature of healthcare and individuals' behaviour. This article analyses the role of cost-eff ectiveness analysis as a device to produce value in the introduction of human papillomavirus vaccines to Colombia. In diff erent institutional pathways and decision-making scenarios cost-eff ectiveness has been the key issue that justifi ed the inclusions and exclusions that such technology entails. Cost-eff ectiveness justifi ed the defi nition of girls as the population target and the exclusion of boys from the risks and benefi ts of this technology. Cost-eff ectiveness analysis has been a key instrument in the sexualising and desexualising of cervical cancer and human papillomavirus vaccines through the rationalisation of economic benefi ts.
This paper analyses the tensions between scientific literature and systematic reviews in the production of evidence in healthcare. Systematic reviews are devices developed - within evidence-based medicine - to navigate the complexities of scientific literature promising a clear and simple account of the knowledge on a particular issue. However, in practice, systematic reviews have a more complex relation with literature. Systematic reviews are shaped according to the interest of the local groups that produce them. In this paper, I explore the formatting, making and managing of systematic reviews of evidence relating to HPV vaccines in Colombia. This case shows the ways in which systematic reviews mediate between the requirement of presenting the evidence that emerges from the international literature and the necessity of having data locally relevant.
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