Preparedness of the Brazilian health-care system to provide access to a disease-modifying Alzheimer's disease treatment.

BACKGROUND: While the majority of patients with Alzheimer's disease resides in low and middle-income countries, little is known of their preparedness for emerging disease-modifying treatments. We analyze the preparedness of Brazil, one of the most populous middle-income countries, from a capacity and institutional preparedness perspective. METHODS: Desk research and 12 interviews for background and capacity data. Markov model to estimate wait times for access to treatment. FINDINGS: Brazil has no national dementia strategy or established pathway for evaluation of cognitive concerns, and dementia is typically diagnosed late if at all. While members of private health plans have ready access to elective specialty care, wait times in the public sector are long. Assuming potentially treatment-eligible patients are referred from primary to specialty care based on a brief cognitive exam and a blood test for the Alzheimer's pathology, available capacity will not be sufficient to match the projected demand. The biggest obstacle is availability of dementia specialist visits, and the effect of population growth and ageing means that the wait list for specialist appointment will continue to grow from around 400,000 in 2022 to over 2.2 million in 2040. We do not project substantial wait times for confirmatory biomarker testing and treatment delivery but note that this is a consequence of patients waiting for their specialist appointments. These queues will result in estimated persistent wait times for treatment of around two years on average with substantial differences between the public and private sectors, as capacity growth is insufficient to keep up with increasing demand. DISCUSSION: Our findings suggest that Brazil is ill-prepared to provide timely access to an Alzheimer's treatment with predicted wait times of about two years, largely because of a limited number of dementia specialists.

New Challenges in Oncology for the Brazilian Private Health Sector: Specialists' Concerns After the ISPOR International Congress in Boston, Massachusetts, 2017.

The congress of the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research is one of the main worldwide forums for the dissemination of research and knowledge on healthcare economics. Brazil is the largest country in Latin America, with a per-capita gross domestic product of $15 200 in 2017 and healthcare expenditure of the order of $1 318 per inhabitant. Brazilian specialists participated actively in the society's latest congress, which took place in Boston, Massachusetts, from May 20 to 24, 2017. They met to discuss the main topics dealt with at the congress and their applicability to Brazilian realities. The topics chosen were precision medicine, new challenges for economic modeling within oncology and immuno-oncology, data to aid in managerial decision making (ie, data from real-world studies), and, lastly, strategies for accessing high-cost medications in Brazil. This opinion article sought to report the main conclusions and consensus reached by this group of specialists on the occasion of this discussion.