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Exploring Progress and Innovation in HEOR & Market Access: A Recap of 2024 and a Look at What’s Ahead in 2025
Written by Elisabeth Fenwick on Wednesday, January 8, 2025
Now that 2024 has drawn to a close and as we welcome 2025, it seems appropriate to reflect on the scientific highlights of the year for OPEN Health HEOR & Market Access.
In 2024, representatives from OPEN Health HEOR & Market Access attended 27 conferences around the world, covering every aspect of our work. These included the World EPA Congress in Amsterdam in March, where key themes explored the evolving landscape of successful drug launches and reimbursement strategies, through to ASH in San Diego in December. In addition, OPEN Health was proud to attend, present at and sponsor the International Academy of Health Preference Research in Calgary, in September, and the World Orphan Drug Congress in Barcelona, in October.
In June, we had a significant presence at HTAi in Seville, where we presented two posters, one concerning the metrics of uncertainty related to Joint Clinical Assessments (JCAs) and one exploring pathways to sustainability in health technology assessment (HTA). In addition, we presented three sessions. In one, titled “Leveraging AI for Systematic Literature Reviews,” Nick Halfpenny, Senior Director and joint lead of EU Strategic Market Access, explored the artificial intelligence (AI) tools that researchers are currently using to support title/abstract screening in systematic literature reviews (SLRs). He included a case study on OPEN Health’s experience testing DistillerSR’s AI classifiers and their potential role in the context of SLRs supporting JCAs. A second panel discussed patient engagement in the new EU HTA regulation, shedding light on some of the opportunities and challenges of stakeholder engagement in Europe and sparking a wealth of follow-up discussions, along with possibilities for further exploration. Our third panel concerned the application of consensus research in HTA, offering a comprehensive overview of the current landscape and applications of consensus methodologies in HTA and beyond.
Our two biggest conferences of the year were ISPOR in Atlanta in May and ISPOR EU in Barcelona in November, where we presented over 30 posters and participated in three panels, plus a short course on advanced survival modeling techniques. In the session “How Can We Move From Generating Robust Patient Preference Information to Producing Decision-Ready Outputs?” Divya Mohan, from OPEN Health’s Patient-Centered Outcomes team, presented on incorporating individual-level preferences generated by a discrete choice experiment into an economic evaluation model that compared treatments for recurrent endometriosis.
In the session “Ending the Struggle: How Can We Put Outcome-Based Risk Sharing Agreements Out of Their Misery?” Elisabeth Fenwick outlined a framework, published earlier this year in Value in Health, that explored circumstances where outcomes-based risk-sharing agreements might be chosen as an option to address uncertainty by both the technology developer and the payer. For details on all OPEN Health presentations at ISPOR EU, please visit the ISPOR event page or view a small selection on our ISPOR posters page.
At several conferences over the year, we witnessed a noticeable shift in terms of focus, with World EPA Congress transitioning from evaluating “value in health” to “value of health” — in which the broader impact on healthcare systems, society, and patient quality of life is evaluated — and with ISPOR unveiling its new strategic plan 2030, in which health is explicitly defined as “whole health.”
In October, Emanuele Arcà and Grace Fox, from our Strategic Market Access team, presented an ISPOR webinar that brought together the two pivotal themes of the year exploring the use of AI in evidence generation for JCAs. In “Evidence Generation for JCAs: How Can AI Boost Efficiency and Maintain Quality?” Emanuele and Grace focused on the integration of AI into the EU HTA process and its transformative role in enhancing evidence synthesis and analysis. Together with industry and academic experts, they explored the application and acceptance of AI for key activities in the EU HTA process, including PICO scoping, SLRs, and indirect treatment comparisons, identifying the potential benefits and challenges of each. ISPOR members who missed the webinar can catch up via the ISPOR education and training site.
In mid-December, Nicki Bush, an Executive Director in our Patient-Centered Outcomes team and Global Head of Endpoint Strategy and COA measurement, provided an industry perspective on the experience of submitting patient experience data to the FDA as a panelist on an FDA-sponsored public workshop.
In 2024, OPEN Health’s Scientific Office launched an internal “buyout fund,” which allows our scientists to “buy out” time from their regular duties to engage in important scientific projects. This scheme illustrates our commitment to fostering a culture of scientific excellence and collaboration while promoting staff development. The buyout fund led to 12 presentations at two international conferences in 2024, nine at ISPOR EU in Barcelona and three at HTAi in Seville. The projects supported by this fund bear a logo declaring them “Sponsored by OPEN Health’s Scientific Office.” In addition, funding from the buyout scheme provided the opportunity for our researchers to develop a manuscript on assessment frameworks for digital therapeutics, to be published in the journal Digital Health at the beginning of 2025.
We were also thrilled to announce, in September 2024, our partnership with the European Patients’ Forum and the European Alliance of Neuromuscular Disorders Associations (EAMDA). The focus of this partnership will be designing and conducting a modified Delphi panel to generate patient expert consensus on PICO scoping across the European Union. In particular, the team plans to test the modified Delphi panel method to obtain patient experts’ consensus on PICO questions and to minimize heterogeneity across inputs from European patients with spinal muscular atrophy.
In 2025, we expect the focus to remain on EU regulation on HTA and AI for HTA alongside a renewed focus on access to, and the affordability of, healthcare. We are looking forward to presenting further insights from our scientific buyout project, developed in collaboration with the European Patients’ Forum, at HTAi in Buenos Aires in June. During a panel titled “Is Consensus the Key to Patient Engagement in HTA? Insights From a Delphi Panel on PICO Scoping,” we will delve into the use of consensus research to advance patient engagement and refine PICO scoping in HTA. Furthermore, we will share findings from our ongoing buyout project, highlighting the potential of AI in facilitating payer discussions and informing price negotiations. Prior to HTAi, we will present at AMCP in Houston on the US-focused portion of this buyout project, where our poster was selected for a poster tour highlighting the use of AI. We will also present the results of our buyout-funded comparison of Medicare-negotiated maximum fair prices with European drug prices. At PSI, in June, we will present a panel on the use of multilevel network meta-regression for HTA alongside representatives from academia and industry. We also look forward to continuing to present our work at other conferences throughout 2025, including ASH, MAPS, and ESMO, along with ISPOR in Montreal and Glasgow.
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