Spotlight on OHE: Recent Awards, Publications and Presentations

This post reviews selected external OHE activities and publications from the past three months.

Martina Garau

 

Awards

Koonal Shah, Health Economist at OHE, has received the European 2012 Meeting Award for an Outstanding Presentation by a Young Investigator from the Society for Medical Decision Making for his paper, Valuing health at the end of life: An empirical study of public preferences[1].  Co-authored with Aki Tsuchiya and Allan Wailoo from the University of Sheffield, this paper reports on research that explores whether the general public supports giving higher priority to life-extending, end-of-life treatment than to other types of treatment. Koonal will present the paper at the SMDM’s 34^th Annual Meeting, scheduled for October 2012.

Recent publications

Articles by OHE team members that appeared over the summer include the following.

Mestre-Ferrandiz, J. (2012) Opinion: ¿Son útiles las proyecciones del gasto farmacéutico? [Is projecting the medicines bill useful?] ElGlobal.net. 27 July. Available at http://bit.ly/TH97UF.

Shah, K., Praet, C., Devlin, N., Sussex, J., Appleby J. and Parkin, D. Is the aim of the English health care system to maximize QALYs? Journal of Health Services Research and Policy. 17(3), 157-164.

Presentations on stratified medicine and R&D discontinuation decisions

In July, Martina Garau presented at the University of Liverpool’s conference, The Science of Stratified Medicine.  The event brought together a wide range of stakeholders to explore the latest developments in stratified medicine, from scientific understanding to patient involvement. Martina’s presentation focused on the economics of stratified medicine, presenting a framework for assessing the value created for patients, the NHS and society.

At the 9^th European Conference on Health Economics in July, Jorge Mestre-Ferrandiz presented the results of OHE research on the reasons for R&D project discontinuation in the pharmaceutical industry[2]. Overall, the research suggests that, for initial/lead indications, commercial considerations are increasing in importance.