Design and features of pricing and payment schemes for health technologies: a scoping review and a proposal for a flexible need-driven classification

Pricing and payment schemes have been proposed as possible solutions to the problems of affordability and access to health technologies. This work mapped existing types of pricing and payment schemes, and proposed a new approach for their classification. Overall, 70 unique types of pricing and payments schemes around different technology types and therapeutic areas have been identified, both theoretical formulations and schemes applied in the real world. The schemes populate the Pay-for-Innovation Observatory, publicly accessible online. Our proposed approach to categorize available types of pricing and payment schemes is to allow a flexible use of the entire repository of schemes, driven by the specific objective that different stakeholders might have, conscious that schemes can be better defined by using the combination of their key characteristics.