Avedis Donabedian Award

Lou Garrison, PhD, is Professor Emeritus in The Comparative Health Outcomes, Policy, and Economics Institute in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Washington, where he joined the faculty in 2004. For the first 13 years of his career, Dr. Garrison worked in non-profit health policy. Following this, he worked as an economist in the pharmaceutical industry for 12 years. From 2002-2004, he was Vice President and Head of Health Economics & Strategic Pricing in Roche Pharmaceuticals, based in Basel, Switzerland.

Dr. Garrison received a BA in Economics from Indiana University, and a PhD in Economics from Stanford University. He has more than 190 publications in peer-reviewed journals. Dr. Garrison was elected as ISPOR President for July 2016-June 2017. He is currently serving as co-chair of ISPOR’s Policy Outlook Committee for the Health Science Policy Council.

Joseph C. Cappelleri earned his MS in statistics from the City University of New York (Baruch College), PhD in psychometrics from Cornell University, and MPH in epidemiology from Harvard University. Dr. Cappelleri is an executive director of biostatistics at Pfizer Inc, where he has served for 25 years and earned the Craig A. Saxton Clinical Development Excellence Award. He has served on the adjunct faculties at Brown University, Tufts Medical Center, and the University of Connecticut. The most published author in the history of Pfizer, and among the most prolific in the pharmaceutical industry, he has co-authored approximately 1,200 external presentations and 600 publications on clinical and methodological topics, including regression-discontinuity designs, meta- analysis, and health measurement scales. Dr. Cappelleri is lead author of the book Patient-Reported Outcomes: Measurement, Implementation and Interpretation and has co-authored or co-edited three other books. He is an elected Fellow of the American Statistical Association.

Ben van Hout’s career started 40 years ago when he, as a student assistant, developed a Markov Chain to model the end stage renal disease programme in the Netherlands. After this, he has been sort of lucky that there were no readymade solutions for most problems in outcomes research and he was allowed to help develop methods concerning modelling, addressing uncertainties and quality of life. The solution to capture what happens on the waiting list for heart transplantation was found in discrete event simulation. What is a cost effectiveness ratio without confidence intervals? How does one compare and value gains in quality of life in different disease areas? Why will hepatitis B vaccination never to be cost effective when using equal discount rates? How do we account for unobserved heterogeneity? And how do we address that every health care researcher, correction, every policy maker, gets a decent background in Bayesian statistics?

Marc L. Berger, MD, is a semi-retired, part-time consultant. Until July 2017, he was Vice President, Real World Data and Analytics at Pfizer, Inc. Marc has held senior-level positions in industry, including Executive Vice President and Senior Scientist at OptumInsight; Vice President, Global Health Outcomes at Eli Lilly and Company; and Vice President, Outcomes Research and Management at Merck & Co., Inc. He currently serves as advisor to several companies, including SHYFT Analytics. Additionally, Marc contributes to ongoing efforts by ISPOR and the Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy to recommend how real-world evidence can be produced to enhance and expand its usefulness for regulatory agencies and other healthcare authorities. Marc has written or cowritten more than 130 peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and other publications on a range of topics, including health services research, outcomes research, health economics, and health policy.

F. Reed Johnson, PhD, has more than 40 years of academic and research experience in health and environmental economics. He has served on the faculties of universities in the United States, Canada, and Sweden, as Distinguished Fellow at Research Triangle Institute, and currently as Professor in the Departments of Population Health Sciences and Medicine, Duke School of Medicine, as well as appointments in the Center for Health Measurement and the Duke Clinical Research Institute. As a staff member in the US Environmental Protection Agency’s environmental economics research program during the 1980s, Dr. Johnson helped pioneer development of nonmarket valuation techniques. These methods are now widely used in federally mandated regulatory impact studies, for estimating the value of improved health outcomes, and for quantifying patients’ tolerance for treatment-related risks. Dr. Johnson has over 140 publications in books and peer-reviewed journals. His research has been published in numerous medical, health-economics, environmental-economics, and general-economics journals. He has coauthored a book on techniques for using existing environmental and health value estimates for policy analysis. He led the first FDA ­sponsored study to quantify patients’ willingness to accept benefit-risk tradeoffs for new health technologies. The study was used to inform recent FDA guidance on submitting patient-preference data to support regulatory reviews of medical devices. His current research involves quantifying patients’ willingness to accept side­ effect risks in return for therapeutic benefits and estimating general time equivalences among health states. He is a founding member of the International Academy of Health Preference Research. He currently serves on the editorial board for The Patient, the Science Advisory Board for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the ISPOR Health Science Policy Council.

Paul Kind, is professor of Health Outcome Measurement at the University of Leeds, UK, and the lead international scientist at the Centre for Health Economics, Management, and Policy at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, St Petersburg, Russia. For more than 40 years, Paul has worked on research regarding the valuation of health benefits for use in clinical and economic evaluation. In addition to his academic work, Paul has acted as a consultant to government and international agencies, and has provided technical support to leading pharmaceutical companies. A founder member of the EuroQoL Group, Paul has only recently stepped down from its leadership team, having served variously as its president and chair of its Scientific Executive. Paul first presented at an ISPOR meeting in 1997 and went on to lead its Quality of Life SIG before subsequently serving as an elected member on the Board of Directors. Collaboration with research colleagues in Latin America and Russia provides Paul with a continuing stream of new projects and challenges. He is completing a long-standing assignment documenting the history of the value and valuation of health.

Dr. Erickson, serves as co-founder and scientific director of The On-Line Guide to Quality-of-Life Assessment (OLGA), an organization that identifies health-related quality-of-life assessments used in clinical practice, clinical trials, and evaluation studies. Before starting OLGA, she developed the Clearinghouse on Health Indexes and its principal output, a quarterly annotated bibliography at the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS).

While at NCHS, Dr. Erickson led the development of the Health and Activity Limitation Index (HALex) and the Healthy People 2000 Years of Healthy Life, both of which were used to monitor the health of the US population from 1990 through 2000 as part of the US Public Health Service's Healthy People initiative.

In addition, she was one of the first to map data collected using health status questionnaires into utility-based health-related quality-of-life scores. This approach was used to create analogs of the quality of well-being and the health utility index using data collected in national health surveys.

After leaving NCHS, Dr. Erickson joined the faculty at Penn State University's Hershey Medical College.

Tony Culyer is Emeritus Professor of economics at York (England); Chair, NICE International Advisory Group, London, England; Senior Fellow at the Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation, University of Toronto; Adjunct Scientist, Institute for Work and Health, Toronto; and Distinguished Visiting Scholar, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.

He was the founding Organiser of the Health Economists' Study Group. For 33 years he was the founding co-editor, with Joe Newhouse, of Journal of Health Economics. He was founding Vice Chair of the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE). For many years he was chair of the Office of Health Economics in London. He is Editor-in-Chief of the on-line Encyclopaedia of Health Economics. He was responsible for the 1994 report that led to the redesign of the NHS's R&D system. For many years he was chair of the Department of Economics & Related Studies at York and, for six of them, was also deputy vice-chancellor. 

He has published widely, mostly in health economics. The third edition of his The Dictionary of Health Economics(Edward Elgar) came out in 2014. A collection of his non-technical essays called The Humble Economist is available on-line free of charge.

Bengt Jönsson, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of Health Economics at the Stockholm School of Economics (SSE), Sweden. Before joining the SSE in 1990, he was professor at Linköping University, Department of Health and Society, 1982-1990. He was director of the Swedish Institute for Health Economics (IHE) in Lund from 1979 to 1982.  He is now chair of IHE scientific advisory board. He is also a member of the European Academy of Cancer Sciences, and vice chair of the EU Expert Panel on effective ways of Investing in health. Professor Jönsson has been a member of the Karolinska University Hospital Board, of the National Social Insurance Board in Sweden, and of SBU (The Swedish Council on Technology Assessment in Health Care), Scientific Advisory Board 1988-2004. Professor Jönsson is a member of the editorial boards of several journals, including the Journal of Cancer Policy, European Journal of Health Economics, and International Journal of Technology Assessment in Health Care. He is past president of Swedish Health Economics Association (SHEA), and the International Health Economists Association (iHEA).