ISPOR International, May 2022: “The Future of HEOR in Patient-Driven Digital Healthcare Systems”

After two years of cancelled and entirely virtual conferences, ISPOR was finally able to return to an in-person format in Washington D.C. this May. The conference adopted a hybrid approach, with a full programme of live in-person sessions, many of which were also available to view online, as well as a number of online only sessions. Costello Medical launched back into ISPOR by sending a team of eight to attend the conference in person, with four team members from our US office in Boston joined by four colleagues from the UK. 

The conference was well attended, with a full exhibition hall of booths and poster presentations to accompany the extensive programme of educational content. We were delighted to have two Costello Medical research posters at the conference exploring technical methods for cost-effectiveness analysis:

• Adoption of Piecewise Modelling: A Review of NICE Health Technology Appraisals in oncology 
• When Does a Treatment Effect Really Stop? Exploration of Different Methods for Modelling Treatment Waning

Notably, the topics driving the agenda seemed to have undergone a step-change at this year’s conference. For a number of years it has felt (to me at least!) as though “pricing and reimbursement challenges for novel therapies” and “capturing additional elements of value” have been the dominant presence amongst the conference programme. Whilst still present this year – reflecting that these challenges have by no means been resolved – these topics did feel less of a focus. The tagline for the conference was “The Future of HEOR in Patient-Driven Digital Healthcare Systems” and the conference programme approached this topic from three key angles across the plenaries and a number of supporting Issue Panels, Workshops and Spotlight sessions:

• Real-World Evidence (RWE): Digital healthcare systems enable RWE. This is nothing new, and indeed RWE has been a key feature of the ISPOR agenda for a number of years; however, this felt like the year when it transitioned from being a forward-looking topic about the potential future power of RWE to being something that is now starting to more meaningfully influence decision-making
• Patient Preferences: The “patient-driven” element of the conference theme was visible through sessions that explored some of the methodological challenges with patient-generated data and discussed the role that patient preferences data should play in informing decisions
• Equity: One of the three plenary sessions was devoted to considering how our analytic tools and methods for analysing healthcare data fare when seeking to inform decisions for diverse populations. In addition, other sessions provided examples of equity-informative analytic methods in use and discussed the challenges with collecting data to inform such analyses