Brita Pekarsky is an applied economist with more than 30 years experience in Health. She is Principal Adviser in Health Economics and Analytics at SA Health, and currently working mainly with the SA Ambulance Service. For 17 years she was a member of the Economic Subcommittee for the Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee. She has worked as a consultant and research academic, a private sector consultant, and in medical research institutes. She has extensive experience in the Aboriginal Health sector, clinical trials, compensation schemes, health technology assessment, health care financing, ambulance services and hospitals. She has a particular interest in pharmaceuticals: research, manufacture, reimbursement, prescribing, regulation, financing, pharmaco-economics and hospital and community pharmacist activity.
In 2012 she completed her PhD on the application of game theory to pharmaceutical pricing decisions by regulators. She developed a shadow price that was the threshold incremental cost per QALY (Quality Adjusted Life Year) for a new drug, where this shadow price accommodates both existing inefficiency in the health budget and bias in the displacement of existing activity to finance new technologies within a fixed budget. This is an alternative to the administrative threshold of a societal value of an additional QALY, unconstrained by a health budget, and without reference to the opportunity for a monopolist manufacturer to price the new drug so as it exactly meets this threshold, rather than reflecting the opportunity cost of the best alternative use of these resources.