OHE’s Adrian Towse is ISPOR President-Elect for 2013-14

OHE’s Director, Professor Adrian Towse, has been elected President of the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR) for the 2014–15 term and will serve on the ISPOR Board of Directors as President-elect during 2013-14.

OHE’s Director, Professor Adrian Towse, has been elected President of the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR) for the 2014–15 term and will serve on the ISPOR Board of Directors as President-elect during 2013-14. Adrian earlier has served on the Board and on the Management Advisory Board of ISPOR’s journal, Value in Health. He has been active in the scientific life of ISPOR as well, presenting at plenary sessions in the US and Europe and participating in many issue panels and workshops.

A member of the Task Force on Prospective Observational Studies which published its report earlier this year, Adrian  currently is co-chair of the Task Force on Performance Based Risk Sharing Agreements (PBRSAs), which is due to report later this month. On the latter topic, Adrian and colleagues Lou Garrison and Josh Carlson of the University of Washington, Seattle, have conducted educational workshops at the ISPOR annual meetings for the past five years.

Adrian set out his vision for ISPOR as follows. Three challenges face ISPOR: (1) continuing to globalise, (2) responding to growing payers’  demands for evidence while addressing their healthy scepticism about the value of the evidence they receive, and (3) continuing to raise scientific standards for health economics and outcomes research (HEOR), thus supporting the next generation of researchers.

These challenges are intertwined.

• Globalisation, which involves understanding the realities of decision making in health systems, particularly in emerging economies, must not compromise on the standards of the science.

• Decision maker scepticism about HEOR evidence can only be tackled by maintaining high scientific standards and by better understanding how and why decisions are made.

• Improving the science involves innovation in methods and making clear their practical value in delivering important evidence for decision makers. This, in turn, takes us back to understanding new groups of decision makers worldwide and the changing needs of established payers.

ISPOR has made great strides on all three of these challenges since I served on the Board a decade ago. At that time, the European meeting was a gamble; we were renegotiating our first Value in Health contract with Blackwell publishing and ensuring listing on PubMed; and we were just beginning to create groups of thought leaders around scientific methods, which evolved into the current successful Task Forces and Special Interest Groups. Links with the FDA, EMA, and payers were tenuous.

Successive Presidents, Boards and the full time staff, led by Marilyn Dix Smith, deserve the credit for all that has happened since then, along with the members whose participation in meetings and scientific work ultimately have ensured the success of the organisation. It is an honour for me to have the opportunity to join the Board again, as President-elect and then to serve as President. I will use this opportunity to help ISPOR realise its 2020 Vision to be recognized globally as a leader in raising the quality of health economics and outcomes research and increasing their use in health care decisions.