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Voices in Value: 2019 Year in Review

By: PhRMA Foundation January 7, 2020

As we begin 2020, we would like to take the opportunity to reflect on the Value Assessment Initiative’s accomplishments over the past year, which have moved us closer to building a better and more efficient health care system.

Last year, the Foundation reached a new milestone with the presentation of the 2019 Challenge Awards. We awarded $85,000 to promising researchers who submitted a paper answering 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 papers were presented at the Foundation’s first-ever conference and are being published in a series of special features in the American Journal of Managed Care. Check out our first place winners, Drs. Lori Frank and Thomas Concannon of the RAND Corporation, and second place winner Dr. Charles E. Phelps of the University of Rochester. Representatives from our four Centers of Excellence were also on hand at the conference to discuss their current and upcoming work. In January, the Foundation will be releasing a series of videos about each center and their value assessment researchers.

We also launched our new mission statement, updating our funding goals and strategic priorities to better align with the evolving health care landscape. New funding opportunities in Drug Discovery, Drug Delivery, Translational Medicine and Outcomes Research will now be offered, and we will also launch a program aimed at the Use and Application of Data and Technology in Health Care.

The Centers’ work garnered significant media attention in 2019 in leading national academic and trade journals.

  • Jon Campbell and Brett McQueen, co-directors of the Center on Pharmaceutical Value (pValue) at the University of Colorado, discussed their research on using multi-criteria decision analysis to evaluate health care treatments with the American Journal of Managed Care and the Journal of Clinical Pathways.
  • Susan dosReis, director of Patient-Driven Values in Healthcare Evaluation (PAVE) at the University of Maryland, wrote about the need for greater inclusion of the patient voice in value assessment research in Managed Care Magazine.
  • PAVE’s Dr. Joey Mattingly teamed up with pValue’s Brett McQueen to write an op-ed in Fierce Healthcare discussing how the comparative effectiveness research platform built by PCORI can be better leveraged to advance patient-centered values in value assessment models.
  • Ed Pezalla, the founder of Enlightenment Bioconsult and a friend of the Foundation, wrote in MedPage Today about how the Research Consortium for Healthcare Value Assessment is exploring novel ways to identify, measure and ultimately reduce low-value health care services that provide little benefit to patients but cumulatively cost the health care system significant sums.

We are coming out of the blocks strong in 2020, launching new initiatives and supporting new research efforts with the goal of advancing the measurement and assessment of value in health care that will benefit all stakeholders, most importantly, patients.

From all of us at the PhRMA Foundation, we hope you have a prosperous 2020!