PhRMA Foundation Centers of Excellence, 2019 Challenge Award Winners Featured at National Value Assessment Conference

Newswise — (November 12, 2019) - New and innovative approaches to value assessment that aim to move beyond traditional metrics and better incorporate the patient voice were on display today at a conference in Washington, DC. Jointly hosted by the PhRMA Foundation and the National Health Council, The Next Generation of Value Assessment: Including the Patient Voice conference brought together leading health economics researchers and patient advocates to discuss the connection between value assessment research and the practical applications that support and strengthen the decision-making process in the U.S. health care system. 

“This conference presented an exciting opportunity to showcase the next generation of value assessment research,” said Eileen Cannon, President of the PhRMA Foundation, who delivered the opening remarks at today’s conference. “Supported by the Foundation’s Value Assessment Initiative, researchers across the country are working to develop new models and methodologies to assess the value of medicines and health care services to improve patient outcomes.”

Featured speakers at today’s conference included Josephine Briggs, MD, Interim Executive Director for the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), who delivered the keynote address, as well as Eleanor Perfetto, PhD, MS, Executive Vice President, Strategic Initiatives of the National Health Council.

Representatives from each of the Foundation’s four Centers of Excellence participated in a panel discussion to highlight how they are working to develop value assessment models that are patient centered, useful to decision makers and appropriately capture the value of innovation. Featured speakers included:

• Susan dosReis, PhD, Director of the Patient Driven Values in Healthcare Education (PAVE) Center at the University of Maryland School of Pharmacy. Dr. dosReis recently wrote about the need for greater inclusion of the patient voice in value assessments in Managed Care Magazine.

• George Miller, PhD, Co-director of the Research Consortium for Health Care Value Assessment, a partnership between Altarum and VBID Health. The Value Consortium’s latest research on identifying, measuring, and developing strategies to reduce the utilization of low-value care can be found here.

• Jon Campbell, PhD, Director of the Center for Pharmaceutical Value (pValue) at the University of Colorado. Dr. Campbell recently discussed his team’s research into using multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) to evaluate health care treatments with the American Journal for Managed Care.

• Peter Neumann, ScD, Principal Investigator of the Center for Enhanced Value Assessment at Tufts Medical Center.

The conference also featured a series of presentations from the winners of the Foundation’s 2019 Challenge Awards, which honored researchers whose work focused on novel proposals to improve value assessment methods that move beyond using the quality-adjusted life year (QALY) to evaluate health care treatments. This year’s awards went to researchers whose submissions answered the question, “What are innovative, patient-centered approaches to contribute to health care value assessment that move beyond the inherent limitations of analyses based on the quality-adjusted life year (QALY) metric?”

The winning submissions will be published in an upcoming special feature in the American Journal of Managed Care.

To view a complete agenda of the conference, including a list of speakers and events, CLICK HERE.

About the PhRMA Foundation

For more than 50 years, the PhRMA Foundation has been helping to build a larger pool of highly trained, top-quality scientists to meet the growing needs of scientific and academic institutions, government, and the research-intensive pharmaceutical industry. To advance this mission, the PhRMA Foundation has awarded more than $95 million in competitive research fellowships and grants since its founding. The Foundation’s emphasis on including the patient voice in evidence-based research that determines the true value of medicines is supported by its Value Assessment Initiative, to which the Foundation has awarded more than $3 million to date. The Foundation also aims to expand research across the drug development spectrum and advance efforts to utilize Health IT in direct application to significant touch points in the health care system.

To learn more, please visit www.phrmafoundation.org and check out the Foundation’s blog, Voices in Value.