Program

Dr Johnson 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 Department of Population Health Sciences and Department of 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 FDA­sponsored 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 side­effect risks in return for therapeutic benefits and estimating general time equivalences among health states.

In 2018 the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research awarded him the Donabedian Outcomes Research Lifetime Achievement Award.  He is a founding member of the International Academy of Health Preference Research.  He currently serves on the editorial board for The Patient, the External Environmental Economics Advisory Board for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the ISPOR Health Science Policy Council. 

Charles E Phelps, PhD, University Professor and Provost Emeritus of the University of Rochester (Rochester, NY USA), health economist, has published major theoretical and applied research in health economics and particularly in cost-effectiveness analysis since beginning his career at the RAND Corporation, including a founding role in the RAND Health Insurance Experiment.  During his time on the active faculty of the University of Rochester (1984 – 2010), he served for five years as chair of the (currently named) Department of Public Health Sciences, and then (for 13 years) as Provost of the University of Rochester.  His more recent work has focused on expanding cost-effectiveness analysis using multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) models, voting theory (to improve use of MCDA models in group settings), and systems approaches to evaluating health care.  His textbook, Health Economics, is in its sixth edition (2017) and (with Stephen T. Parente) published in 2017 a new book entitled “The Economics of US Health Care Policy.”  He was elected to the Institute of Medicine (now the National Academy of Medicine) in 1991.  Professor Phelps served as a member of the ISPOR Task Force on Value in Health in 2016-2017. 

PATRICIA M. DANZON

 

                                                                                               

Patricia Danzon is the Celia Moh Professor Emeritus at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Professor Danzon received a B.A. from Oxford University, England, and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago. She previously held faculty positions at Duke University and the University of Chicago. Professor Danzon is an internationally recognized expert in the fields of economics of health care, the biopharmaceutical industry, and insurance.  She is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and the National Academy of Social Insurance, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She has served as a consultant to many governmental agencies, NGOs and private corporations in the US and internationally. Professor Danzon has served on the Board of Directors of Medarex, Inc., the Policy and Global Affairs Board of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Policy Board of the Office of Health Economics in London.

 

Professor Danzon has been an Associate Editor of the American Economic Review, the Journal of Health Economics and the International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics. She has published widely in scholarly journals on a broad range of subjects related to health care, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, insurance, and the economics of law.  She served as Section Editor on “The BioPharmaceutical and Medical Technology Industries” in Elsevier’s  Encyclopedia of Health Economics (2014) and co-edited the Handbook on the Economics of the Biopharmaceutical Industry (2012), for Oxford University Press. Recent publications include: “Affordability Challenges to Value-Based Pricing: Mass Diseases, Orphan Diseases, and Cures”. Value in Health 2017; “Pharmacy Benefit Management: Are Reporting Requirements Pro or Anti-Competitive?” International Journal of the Economics of Business 22(2) 2015:  245-261.

 

"Dr Susan Griffin, has over sixteen years' experience in health economics.  She specialises in methodological and applied research, and has developed methods for incorporating health inequalities into economic evaluation and reflecting cost and health impacts across sectors.  Susan has been a member of the NICE Technology Appraisal Committee, and received funding from NICE in terms of technology appraisal and methodological support for public health guidelines and through the Decision Support Unit.  Her work for NICE included an assessment of incorporating wider societal benefits in technology appraisal, methods by which NICE processes can incorporate health inequality impacts, and an assessment of the impact of previous recommendations on health inequality."

Mark McClellan, MD, PhD, is Director and Robert J. Margolis, M.D., Professor of Business, Medicine and Policy at the Margolis Center for Health Policy at Duke University. He is a physician-economist who focuses on quality and value in health care, including payment reform, real-world evidence and more effective drug and device innovation. He is former administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and former commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, where he developed and implemented major reforms in health policy. He is an independent director on the boards of Johnson & Johnson, Cigna, Alignment Health Care and Seer, and is co-chair of the Guiding Committee for the Health Care Payment Learning and Action Network.

As Senior Director, Health Outcomes at Prime Therapeutics, Dr. Gleason leads Prime’s clinical health outcomes assessment team in the development and improvement of pharmacy benefit management programs. Through integrated medical and pharmacy claims data analysis, Dr. Gleason assesses clinical program opportunity and post-implementation outcomes.

 

Dr. Gleason is an Adjunct Professor of Pharmacy at the University of Minnesota, College of Pharmacy. He is a Board Certified Pharmacotherapy Specialist (BCPS), an elected Fellow of the Academy of Managed Care Pharmacy (FAMCP), as well as an the American College of Clinical Pharmacy (FCCP). Dr. Gleason currently serves on the Academy of Managed Care Pharmacy, Board of Directors.

 

He has over 40 peer-reviewed publications in medical and health policy journals such as Health Affairs, Journal of Managed Care Pharmacy (JMCP), Medical Care, Archives of Internal Medicine, and JAMA.

 

Dr. Gleason completed his Bachelor of Science and Pharmacy Doctorate degrees at the University of Minnesota. Gleason also completed an Ambulatory Care Pharmacy Practice Residency at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center followed by a Fellowship in Outcomes Research through the University of Pittsburgh, School of Pharmacy.

 

 

Josh Seidman, Senior Vice President, Avalere Health, advises clients on health delivery and payment innovation with a focus on using information technology to guide value-based care models. He applies his background in quality, health IT, and patient engagement to accountable care delivery system transformation and new payment models. Prior to joining Avalere, Josh was a Managing Director at Evolent Health, where he supported large delivery system clients in quality measurement and performance improvement around clinical transformation, patient engagement, and population health management programs. Prior to that, Josh was a Director of Meaningful Use at the Department of Health and Human Services in the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, the founding President of the Center for Information Therapy, and Director of Measure Development at NCQA. Josh holds a PhD and an MHS in Health Policy and Management from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a BA from Brown University. Josh is a Past President of the Society for Participatory Medicine and was a William B. Ziff Fellow for patient engagement with the Center for Advancing Health.

 

Dr. Schnipper is the immediate past Clinical Director of the Cancer Center and Chief, Division of Hematology/Oncology at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and the Theodore W. and Evelyn G. Berenson Distinguished Professor of Medicine in the field of Oncology at Harvard Medical School.  He is the Associate Director of the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center for membership, Deputy Associate Director for Clinical Sciences and a member of its executive committee. Dr. Schnipper received his M.D. from the State University of New York Downstate College of Medicine, summa cum laude, and prior to joining the BIDMC, trained at the Yale New Haven Medical Center, the National Cancer Institute, and Washington University.

 

In addition to his clinical work and teaching, Dr. Schnipper is deeply committed to oncology research, having been the recipient of numerous peer-reviewed grants over the years from the National Cancer Institute and American Cancer Society. He research has contributed to our understanding of the mechanism of action of anti-viral and anti-neoplastic therapies, genomic instability in cancer, and more recently, quality and value in cancer care.

 

At the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center Dr. Schnipper and colleagues built an innovative hematology-oncology clinical and training program. This is complemented by a translational research program the focus of which is understanding the biology of cancer in order to develop innovative approaches to patient care.

 

Dr. Schnipper has a long commitment to health care policy and medical ethics.  He has been a member of the Board of Directors of the American Cancer Society and president of its Massachusetts Division.  He is the recipient of the St. George Medal from the American Cancer Society and a Distinguished Public Service Award from the American Society of Clinical Oncology.  Dr. Schnipper has held numerous leadership positions in the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) including Chairmanships of the Cancer Research, Ethics and Public Issues Committees, and currently serves as the Chairman of the ASCO Task Force on the Value of Cancer Care.

 

Dr. Schnipper’s professional interests extend to Global Oncology. Since 2011 he has collaborated with NGO’s committed to supporting health care in under-resourced populations. These initiatives have resulted in extensive replacement/refurbishment of needed equipment in a hospital in rural Zimbabwe, as well as collaborations with physicians and nurses at mission hospitals in Zimbabwe to develop and implement a program for screening for cervical cancer. To date, in excess of 9000 women have been served by this health education and cancer prevention initiative.

 

Rick Chapman, PhD
Director of Health Economics

Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER)

As Director of Health Economics at ICER, Rick directs the development of economic evaluations to accompany rigorous reviews of clinical evidence, assessing the potential costs, cost-effectiveness, and budgetary impact of a wide range of diagnostic, prognostic, therapeutic and other clinical interventions.

 

Before coming to ICER, Rick was a Vice President of Health Economics and Outcomes Research at Avalere Health, directing the design and analysis of economic evaluations and health outcomes studies. Prior to that, Rick Chapman was a principal in HEOR and the US regional lead for the Retrospective Database Analysis Center of Excellence at IMS Health, where he was responsible for conducting studies using several types of real world observational data (including medical and pharmacy administrative claims, electronic medical records, survey data, and registries). Previously, Rick had been at the Center for Risk Analysis at the Harvard School of Public Health, and before that, conducted research on the practice of transfusion medicine at the Center for Blood Research in Boston.

 

Rick holds a PhD in health policy with a concentration in decision sciences from Harvard University. He also holds an MS in health policy and management from the Harvard School of Public Health, where he investigated the association between quality of care and health-care financing mechanisms.

"Dr Susan Griffin, has over sixteen years' experience in health economics.  She specialises in methodological and applied research, and has developed methods for incorporating health inequalities into economic evaluation and reflecting cost and health impacts across sectors.  Susan has been a member of the NICE Technology Appraisal Committee, and received funding from NICE in terms of technology appraisal and methodological support for public health guidelines and through the Decision Support Unit.  Her work for NICE included an assessment of incorporating wider societal benefits in technology appraisal, methods by which NICE processes can incorporate health inequality impacts, and an assessment of the impact of previous recommendations on health inequality."

Nancy is Professor of Health Economics at the University of Melbourne and Senior Fellow at the Office of Health Economics, London. She is Chair of the Board of the EuroQol Research Foundation and served as President of ISPOR (2019-2020). Her principal areas of research expertise are the measurement and valuation of patient reported health outcomes; the cost effectiveness thresholds used in making judgments about value for money in health care; and priority setting in health care. She is currently leading a large programme of research to improve measurement and valuation of quality of life in children (QUOKKA), funded by the Medical Research Future Fund (Australia).  Nancy has published >150 original peer reviewed journal papers on a wide range of empirical and theoretical topics in health economics.

Jeroen P Jansen is Lead Scientific Advisor of the Open Source Value Project (OSVP) at the Innovation and Value Initiative. The OSVP is a collaborative and iterative process for the development of transparent open-source cost-effectiveness models and other tools for value assessment of medical interventions. Dr. Jansen is also Adjunct Professor of Health Research & Policy (Epidemiology) at Stanford University and Chief Scientist for Evidence Synthesis & Decision Modeling at the Precision Medicine Group.

 

Dr. Jansen has 15 years of research experience in the areas of epidemiology, evidence synthesis, and cost-effectiveness evaluations in a variety of disease states. His current research interests are statistical methods for evidence synthesis and the development of open-source simulation and decision models. He has published both applied and methods research in his areas of expertise and is widely cited. Notable contributions are the development of synthesis methods to overcome the typical challenges in cost-effectiveness evaluations characterized by gaps in the evidence base and complex evidence structures. Furthermore, Dr. Jansen led initiatives to develop guidance for consumers and producers of network meta-analysis studies. He is co-author of a textbook on network meta-analysis for decision-making and was associate editor for the Journal for Research Synthesis Methods.

 

Dr. Jansen has a PhD in epidemiology from the Erasmus University in the Netherlands.

Robert W. Dubois, MD, PhD, is the chief science officer and executive vice president of the National Pharmaceutical Council (NPC). In this role, he oversees NPC’s research on policy issues related to the appropriate role of real-world evidence in decision-making, how best to determine value of health care services, the relationship between access and health outcomes, and approaches to maintain an environment supportive of innovation.

Dr. Dubois, who is board certified in internal medicine, brings more than 25 years of experience in health care research, with a particular focus on understanding and ensuring that patients receive high value health care. He has co-founded and led various health care research organizations in developing quality research with practical application. Most recently, he was the chief medical officer at Cerner LifeSciences, where he focused on comparative effectiveness and the use of an electronic health records infrastructure to implement clinical change. 

Prior to joining Cerner in 2001, Dr. Dubois co-founded Protocare Sciences and was its executive vice president, chief medical officer, and later its CEO. 

Throughout his career, Dr. Dubois’ primary interest has centered on defining “what works” in health care and finding ways for that evidence to inform health care decision-making. He is a recognized expert in the areas of defining best practice, disease management and appropriateness of care. He has authored more than 160 peer-reviewed articles on comparative effectiveness, evidence-based medicine, the development of practice guidelines and determining the optimal use of high-cost medical services.

Dr. Dubois received his AB from Harvard College, his MD from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and his PhD in health policy from the RAND Graduate School. He is a member of the Medicare Evidence Development and Coverage Advisory Committee, Steering Committee for the Electronic Data Methods Forum, and the Advisory Board of the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review. Additionally, he is the associate editor of the Journal of Comparative Effectiveness Research and is on the editorial board for Health Affairs and The American Journal of Managed Care.

Robert W. Dubois, MD, PhD

Chief Science Officer & Executive Vice-President

Charles E Phelps, PhD, University Professor and Provost Emeritus of the University of Rochester (Rochester, NY USA), health economist, has published major theoretical and applied research in health economics and particularly in cost-effectiveness analysis since beginning his career at the RAND Corporation, including a founding role in the RAND Health Insurance Experiment.  During his time on the active faculty of the University of Rochester (1984 – 2010), he served for five years as chair of the (currently named) Department of Public Health Sciences, and then (for 13 years) as Provost of the University of Rochester.  His more recent work has focused on expanding cost-effectiveness analysis using multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) models, voting theory (to improve use of MCDA models in group settings), and systems approaches to evaluating health care.  His textbook, Health Economics, is in its sixth edition (2017) and (with Stephen T. Parente) published in 2017 a new book entitled “The Economics of US Health Care Policy.”  He was elected to the Institute of Medicine (now the National Academy of Medicine) in 1991.  Professor Phelps served as a member of the ISPOR Task Force on Value in Health in 2016-2017. 

J. Jaime Caro, PhD, MDCM, FRCPC, FACP, is Chief Scientist at Evidera where he advances Evidera’s leadership in developing and applying novel techniques in modeling, health economics, comparative effectiveness, epidemiology, and outcomes research. Dr. Caro is also adjunct Professor of Medicine, Epidemiology and Biostatistics at McGill University, and Professor in Practice at the London School of Economics. He also lends his teaching ability to other academic institutions such as Thomas Jefferson University School of Population Health.

Dr. Caro continues to pioneer new methodologies. In an effort to provide an alternative to the well-known cost per QALY technique and avoid many of the latter’s problems, he is working on a broader approach to valuing health benefits. He is also further developing DICE, the unified approach to health economic modeling that he has created. Working with health technology assessment agencies and academic groups, he is formalizing this innovation to enable rapid, standardized and less error-prone development of decision-analytic model. Previously, Dr. Caro adapted an engineering technique – discrete event simulation – to model diseases and their treatment and extended it further to simulate the design of clinical trials and other types of studies, something which has been particularly effective in helping design pragmatic clinical trials. He has also applied the technique to provide comparative effectiveness information in the absence of head-to-head trials in a new method called Simulated Treatment Comparison. In response to increasingly frequent requests by authorities to provide data to support the value of new interventions, Dr. Caro has applied simulation techniques to make post-marketing registries more feasible and efficient – an approach called SAVES.

On behalf of the German health technology assessment agency, he proposed an innovative approach to the assessment of health technologies, involving the efficiency frontier. As part of his work with governments, he has helped the World Bank Institute and the InterAmerican Court for Human Rights address the growing problem of Supreme Courts overriding health care system decisions and ordering them to provide treatments that had been considered unwarranted.  After leading the Quality Assurance for Modeling Studies Task Force, jointly sponsored by ISPOR, Academy of Managed Care Pharmacy and the National Pharmaceutical Council, and the ISPOR-SMDM Good Modeling Practices Task Force, endorsed by the Society for Medical Decision Making, Dr. Caro was recently named co-chair of the ISPOR Science and Research Committee and has been awarded the Marilyn Dix Smith Leadership Award.

Dr Johnson 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 Department of Population Health Sciences and Department of 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 FDA­sponsored 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 side­effect risks in return for therapeutic benefits and estimating general time equivalences among health states.

In 2018 the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research awarded him the Donabedian Outcomes Research Lifetime Achievement Award.  He is a founding member of the International Academy of Health Preference Research.  He currently serves on the editorial board for The Patient, the External Environmental Economics Advisory Board for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the ISPOR Health Science Policy Council. 

PATRICIA M. DANZON

 

                                                                                               

Patricia Danzon is the Celia Moh Professor Emeritus at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Professor Danzon received a B.A. from Oxford University, England, and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago. She previously held faculty positions at Duke University and the University of Chicago. Professor Danzon is an internationally recognized expert in the fields of economics of health care, the biopharmaceutical industry, and insurance.  She is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and the National Academy of Social Insurance, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She has served as a consultant to many governmental agencies, NGOs and private corporations in the US and internationally. Professor Danzon has served on the Board of Directors of Medarex, Inc., the Policy and Global Affairs Board of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Policy Board of the Office of Health Economics in London.

 

Professor Danzon has been an Associate Editor of the American Economic Review, the Journal of Health Economics and the International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics. She has published widely in scholarly journals on a broad range of subjects related to health care, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, insurance, and the economics of law.  She served as Section Editor on “The BioPharmaceutical and Medical Technology Industries” in Elsevier’s  Encyclopedia of Health Economics (2014) and co-edited the Handbook on the Economics of the Biopharmaceutical Industry (2012), for Oxford University Press. Recent publications include: “Affordability Challenges to Value-Based Pricing: Mass Diseases, Orphan Diseases, and Cures”. Value in Health 2017; “Pharmacy Benefit Management: Are Reporting Requirements Pro or Anti-Competitive?” International Journal of the Economics of Business 22(2) 2015:  245-261.

 

Liz Spurgin is a healthcare business and policy executive who joined MDIC in July 2018 to start up the Health Economics & Patient Access initiative. In this role, she will lead membership initiatives to promote enhanced speed and predictability of coverage and payment for innovative new medical technology.

Her sector-wide experience includes roles in industry, provider, payer and consulting with a focus on market access, evidence development, policy and payment for medical devices.  Her work at MedStar Health, Deltex Medical and two Washington DC advisory firms centered on removing economic and clinical barriers to advances in patient care.  She is a strong advocate for technologies, services and practices that improve population health.

Liz received her BA from the University of Illinois and her MBA from the University of Connecticut.

Adrian Towse, MA, MPhil, is the Emeritus Director & Senior Research Fellow of the Office of Health Economics (OHE). OHE is a charitable research organisation (registration number 1170829) which also has a consulting arm (OHE Consulting Ltd). OHE works in the related fields of the economics of HTA, the economics of health care systems and the economics of the life sciences industry.  Adrian Towse is a Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics and a Visiting Senior Researcher at the Health Economics Research Centre, Nuffield Department of Population Health at the University of Oxford. Adrian also has been a visiting Professor at the University of York, and for ten years he served as a Non-Executive Director of the Oxford University Hospitals NHS Trust, one of the UK's largest teaching and research hospitals. He chaired the Governance Committee overseeing arrangements for delivering clinical quality.

Adrian has published on 'risk-sharing' arrangements between payers and manufacturers; value-based pricing; HTA development in emerging markets; the economics of stratified (personalized) medicine for payers and the industry; differential pricing, the use of ICERs to arrive at optimal pricing across countries; economic issues that affect both R&D for and access to treatments for diseases prevalent in the developing world; and the economics of medical negligence. Adrian was educated at Keble College, University of Oxford, Nuffield College, University of Oxford, and the Oxford Centre for Management Studies (now the Said Business School). He is also a Member of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants.

Adrian served on the ISPOR Board of Directors 1999-2001 and subsequently on the ViH Management Board. He has played an active role in the scientific life of ISPOR, presenting at ISPOR Plenary sessions in the US and Europe as well as many Issues Panels and Workshops. He was a member of the Task Force on Prospective Observational Studies and the co-Chair of the Task Force on Performance Based Risk Sharing Agreements (PBRSAs). He has given pre-conference training sessions on PBRSAs with colleagues from the University Of Washington School Of Pharmacy for the last nine years. Adrian served as President of ISPOR in the year 2014-2015.

 

 

 

 

 

Newell is Vice President, Health Economics and Outcomes Research at Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Inc. He is a recognized leader in HEOR with 30 years experience in the pharmaceutical industry.  Prior to coming to Boehringer Ingelheim, Newell led outcomes research groups at Pfizer and Merck.  He has been actively engaged with a number of outcomes research related organizations, is a past ISPOR Board member and currently chairs the ISPOR Health Science Policy Council. 
Newell received his PharmD from Mercer University and his MSPH (epidemiology) from the University of Utah.  He completed a clinical pharmacy residency at Osteopathic Medical Center of Texas and a post-doctoral fellowship in clinical pharmacology and toxicology at the University of Utah Medical Center

Dr. Bryan R. Luce is President & CEO of Luce Outcomes Research; Affiliate Professor, Pharmaceutical Outcomes Research & Policy Program, School of Pharmacy, University of Washington; Senior Advisor, Evidera; and Chair, Scientific Collaboration, EXCITE International.  From 2013- 2015, he was Chief Science Officer at the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute where he was responsible for leading the development and implementation of PCORI’s patient-centered comparative clinical effectiveness research (CER) agenda. Luce previously founded the outcomes research firm MEDTAP® International, serving as its chairman, president, and chief executive officer and was the senior  vice president for science policy at the United BioSource Corporation.

 

Earlier, Luce was director of Battelle’s Centers for Public Health Research and Evaluation; director of the Office of Research and Demonstrations, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services; and a senior analyst at Office of Technology Assessment of the United States Congress.

 

Luce’s research has focused on improving methods and related policies for more efficient healthcare decision making. He has authored more than 100 scientific publications, including three textbooks on health technology assessment, health policy, and health economics. In 2008, Luce founded the Pragmatic Approaches to Comparative Effectiveness (PACE) Initiative, which studies novel methods to conduct analytical efficiency comparative effectiveness trials. Previously, he founded the Bayesian Initiative in Health Economics and Outcomes Research. He has advised numerous government and nonprofit agencies, as well as pharmaceutical and device firms worldwide; a member or chair of socioeconomic and public health policy advisory boards for leading biopharmaceutical companies; and a member of the Medicare Evidence Development & Coverage Advisory Committee (MedCAC).

 

Luce is a past president of the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR) and in 2008 received the Society’s Avedis Donabedian Outcomes Research Lifetime Achievement Award. He has held adjunct faculty positions in the Department of Health Policy at Jefferson Medical College and the Leonard D. Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics at the University of Southern California.

 

A former Special Forces Officer, Luce is a Lieutenant Colonel (Retired), US Army Reserves. He holds MS (public health) and MBA degrees from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and a PhD in health services research from the University of California at Los Angeles.

 

Suz Schrandt is a patient and patient engagement engineer with a health and disability law and policy background.  She is the Founder and CEO of ExPPect, a patient engagement initiative focused on improving healthcare and research through the expertise and partnership of skilled patient partners.  Schrandt previously served as the Director of Patient Engagement at the Arthritis Foundation and as the Deputy Director of Patient Engagement for the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI); in both capacities she led the development and execution of patient engagement strategies to support research, medical product development, care delivery, and other innovation.

Before joining PCORI, Schrandt served as the Health Reform Team Leader for the Kansas Health Institute and she has held roles in bioethics, the study of genetic discrimination, and chronic disease self-management, as well as patient-led clinical training aimed at increasing early diagnosis and appropriate, patient-centered management of chronic disease. Schrandt’s passion for patient engagement began in large part from her own experience, having been diagnosed with polyarticular juvenile idiopathic arthritis as a teenager, several years before the first biologics were available.  She has undergone multiple joint replacement and other orthopedic surgeries and has logged nearly thirty years of first-hand experience with the healthcare system. 

Schrandt is one of nine voting members on the FDA’s inaugural Patient Engagement Advisory Committee.  She has been the Chairperson for the International Society of Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR) North American Patient Representative Roundtable since 2016, co-chaired the Patients as Partners conference from 2016 to 2018, and has been an invited speaker at numerous national and international conferences.  Schrandt received her law degree from the University of Kansas School of Law and has co-authored multiple peer-reviewed articles on the value and importance of patient engagement. 

 

John M. O'Brien, PharmD, MPH, is the president and chief executive officer of the National Pharmaceutical Council (NPC), which sponsors and participates in research on the appropriate use of pharmaceuticals and the clinical and economic value of pharmaceutical innovation. NPC’s research contributes to the scientific foundation for informed discussions about health care access, coverage, appropriate use and value. As president and chief executive officer, Dr. O'Brien is responsible for overseeing NPC’s policy research and communications capacity, partnerships with other health care organizations, and strategic vision.

Dr. O’Brien’s broad experience spans the private sector, academia and government. Prior to joining NPC, Dr. O’Brien was senior advisor to the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services and deputy assistant secretary of planning and evaluation (health policy). He has also held senior policy positions in the life sciences and managed care industries, including at CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield, was a career official at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) during the Obama administration, and served as a health policy fellow in the U.S. Senate. 

Dr. O’Brien earned his doctorate in pharmacy at Nova Southeastern University, his master’s degree in public health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and studied pharmacy and public policy at the University of Florida. His post-graduate experience includes the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP) Executive Fellowship in Association Management and Leadership and the America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) Certified Health Insurance Executive Fellowship.

He has held a number of academic appointments, including senior fellow at the USC-Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics, clinical assistant professor at the Rutgers Pharmaceutical Industry Fellowship program, and assistant professor of clinical and administrative sciences at the Notre Dame of Maryland University College of Pharmacy, the first program of its kind created by a U.S. women’s college.

Dr. O’Brien has served on the boards of Pharmacy Quality Solutions, Kennedy Center Circles and the Congressional Chorus.