9:10am-10:00am
Supporting Reimbursement of Pharmaceuticals
Stephanie R. Earnshaw, PhD, Global Head, Health Economics US; and Stephen M. Beard, PhD, Global Head, Health Economics and European Operations, RTI International
With healthcare expenditures on the rise, evaluating a pharmaceutical product’s economic characteristics is as important as evaluating its safety and efficacy. In today’s environment, many health care payers require economic evaluations of these products to demonstrate their value for money to support eventual reimbursement. In this session, Earnshaw and Beard will review the current environment for supporting reimbursement of pharmaceutical products using decision-analytic modeling techniques. They will explore current practices in economic evaluation and multinational guidelines for performing these evaluations, specifically concepts around basic analyses of cost-effectiveness and budget impact which are standard analyses used for supporting reimbursement. The speakers will also offer examples of decision analytic models that have been used to support reimbursement.
10:30am-11:20am
Optimization in Medical Diagnosis and Treatment
Ariela Sofer, PhD, Professor and Chair, Systems Engineering and Operations Research Department, George Mason University; affiliated with the Simulation Group, ISIS Center, Department of Radiology, Georgetown University Medical Center
Optimization has emerged as a promising tool in medical diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment planning. Medicine is an exciting field, not only because of the complex interdisciplinary nature of the research problems, but also because of the immense potential impact of successful solutions. In this presentation, Sofer will present sample applications of optimization to medicine. She will discuss the problems, the corresponding mathematical models, proposed solution methods, and challenges and opportunities for future research.
11:30am-12:20pm
A New Use of Statistical Modeling: Lowering Health Cost and Improving Workforce Health
Mel Hall, Jr., MS, Chairman and CEO, Comprehensive Health Services, Inc.
Managing and reducing health care costs will require transforming how health care is delivered, changing the dynamics of health costs, making the employee part of the solution, and integrating various, often fragmented health services and MIS. Comprehensive Health Services (CHS) is conducting ground-breaking medical research with Georgia Tech to develop a new workforce health assessment model to identify and analyze health risks in the workplace and to develop more cost-effective strategies for reducing health risks and their consequences. What we are examining in-depth are the fundamental and underlying health risks associated with a given workforce or work environment and the best ways of protecting workers from those health risks so as to reduce the high cost of expensive treatments and insurance plans. In this session, Hall will review this research and provide an update on its progress.
3:10pm-4:00pm
Decision Analysis in Medicine
Scott B. Cantor, PhD, Associate Professor, Section of Health Services Research, Department of Biostatistics, The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center
The field of medical decision-making applies quantitative tools for making patient or health policy decisions. Unlike biostatistics, which seeks to describe or forecast clinical outcomes, the primary focus of medical decision-making is to prescribe optimal decisions. Cantor will introduce the discipline of medical decision-making, and then present a clinical decision analysis of the risks and benefits of prostate cancer screening. He will demonstrate the importance of utilities and perspective in determining an optimal decision. Cantor will summarize by recognizing the potential contributions of decision analysis to medicine and the contributions of medical decision-making to the field of decision analysis.
4:10pm-5:00pm
The Use and Application of Operations Research Approaches at Mayo Clinic
Mark J. Hayward, MS, Vice-Chair, Department of Facilities and Support Services, and Associate Administrator for Outpatient Operations, Mayo Clinic
A recent Institute of Medicine report called for the increased use of industrial engineering and OR tools and techniques in health care to support improved patient care reliability and efficiency. The Mayo Clinic, a premier academic medical center based in Rochester, MN, has many years of experience in employing operations research approaches to improve processes and outcomes. Hayward will review a wide variety of examples of the use of OR tools at Mayo Clinic, including:
• Simulation to develop an effective and efficient mass immunization clinic,
• Genetic and linear algorithms to optimize patient schedules,
• Decision analysis to review organ allocation options,
• Transportation network analysis to support specimen/materials movement,
• Heuristic modeling to define optimal primary care panel size,
• Surgical suite optimization using simulation modeling and sensitivity analysis.
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