Article updated July 2024
This critical role links treatment to actual outcomes, establishing guidance that could improve patient access, overall care, and outcomes.
Pharmaceutical companies emphasize HEOR because it helps HCPs, insurance companies, and patients compare and choose treatment options. HEOR also has an impact on successful drug launches. For example, will the market support your prices, and are your sales targets realistic? HEOR can directly inform those.
Companies have only a short time to make headway in a crowded market. HEOR in pharma must obtain competitive reimbursement by proving their product raises the standard of care and is more cost-effective than any alternatives.
HEOR analytics provide important context that makes one drug or treatment more appealing than other options on the market, whether it’s an established drug or a new competitor entering the market simultaneously.
We help pharma companies increase access to their treatments.
The need for HEOR services is likely to continue growing. This is due to the use of healthcare and life science technologies that support data analysis and more accurate decision-making.
- The benefits of HEOR in drug development
- The future of health economics and outcomes research in the pharmaceutical industry
- Insights management technology and HEOR
- Conclusion
The ISPOR 2024 – 2025 Top 10 HEOR Trends Report cites drug pricing, AI and fostering innovation among the top trends.
These trends are closely linked, especially given the $2 billion estimated cost to get new drugs to market before adoption and revenue generation can begin. Accelerating innovation by quickly and effectively designing and enrolling clinical trials, making more efficient use of KOLs’ time to generate insights for better decisions that drive strategic decisions are among the highest value attributes Within3 can offer pharma teams.
Our Moderator Assistant capability combines the power of artificial intelligence (AI) with an updated, modern user experience to drive more healthcare engagement and insights. With assisted moderation, AI combs through responses in real-time so you don’t have to, serving up conversation summaries, recommending follow-up actions, and enabling you to drive further conversation and deeper insights in less time. It is built on our proven AI capabilities and is unique to the industry, providing up to 7x the feedback of typical engagement settings like Zoom, Teams, or in-person meetings.
This feature eliminates about 90% of the work associated with moderating, analyzing, and reporting on insight-gathering activities like advisory boards, steering committees, and other common types of engagements.It is secure for pharma companies, unlike the consumer versions of publicly available chatbots like ChatGPT. Business teams can safely take advantage of the speed and convenience of generative AI while maintaining data privacy.
The benefits of HEOR in drug development
There are several key advantages to working with HEOR pharma teams.
Cost-effective drug development
As pressure on drug prices mounts (with no signs of abating, especially in the United States), pharma teams can use HEOR research to accelerate milestone achievement throughout the drug development and commercialization process and ultimately develop more cost-effective drugs. In one example from a Within3 client, a medical affairs team held a HEOR virtual advisory board to get funding for a certain cancer treatment. The team needed feedback on developing a cost-effectiveness model (CEM) for the drug to increase prescriber and patient access.
In this case, the pharma team engaged health technology assessment experts worldwide to learn about global cost-effectiveness approaches for the drug. They also wanted to know what updates they would need to consider to proposed approaches and methodologies. Finally, the team wondered what challenges they might encounter when submitting the cost-effectiveness model to authorities in various countries.
The medical affairs team got the information they needed to develop the CEM. When considering their choice to conduct the advisory board via the Within3 insights management platform rather than a one-off in-person meeting, the team was able to attribute the following positive outcomes:
- 100% advisor participation despite the advisors’ busy schedules, geographic distance, and multiple preferred languages
- Ability to add a large number of session observers, who could follow the discussion and suggest areas of interest for follow-up to the moderators
- Complete session transcripts viewable by question or by the individual advisor, saving time on manual processing and analysis
This type of research helps companies avoid market access issues, which can hamper a drug launch and negatively impact sales revenues. (Related content: What is launch excellence?)
Understanding the economic impact of new drugs
New drugs have far-reaching impacts on patients and the pharma industry. Ultimately, the most important outcomes are related to the quality of life for patients, but HEOR data generated for one treatment can also affect the prices of other drugs or encourage competition in the market.
“HEOR [teams] aid clinical development by giving useful information about specific treatments, such as population accessibility and competitor pricing,” reports the Journal of Health Economics and Outcomes Research. “HEOR services are used to determine the price of a newly produced drug and to revise the prices of existing drugs, thereby boosting the industry’s growth.”
The future of health economics and outcomes research in the pharmaceutical industry
Until relatively recently, HEOR had more impact on treatment or therapy decisions with European payers, who placed more value on health economics metrics like quality of life adjusted years (QALYs), than with American payers. But the market for HEOR services is growing in North America, set to reach $894 million in 2028 in one estimation. ISPOR estimates the value of the global HEOR market at $2 billion, with double-digit projected growth over the next five years.
There are many reasons for this growth, primarily a surge in clinical trials and the number of healthcare systems and institutions facing tighter budget constraints. Understanding payer acceptance and market access will be even more critical in this environment.
Pharma teams also think more broadly about deploying HEOR expertise in their organizations. A few major global drug companies added HEOR leaders to their commercial functions. This move allows sales and marketing teams to benefit from expertise in analyzing patient-level data or determining how to communicate study data to payers, HCPs, and patients. When these experts are embedded in the sales team, there is less concern about compromising the firewall between medical affairs and commercial.
What if your therapy could win on value, where value equals outcomes divided by costs because accelerating your development and commercialization efforts translates into a lower, more competitive price for your drug or therapy?
Increasing importance of HEOR in healthcare systems
HEOR data is important to healthcare systems for a very important reason: “payer organizations are shrewd, cost-conscious, and data hungry.” If a treatment can’t achieve favorable formulary placement, patients won’t ask for it, physicians won’t prescribe it, and perhaps most importantly, payers won’t reimburse it.
Healthcare systems can’t afford to take a chance on whether or not a costly treatment will be adequately reimbursed or if the treatment will have a measurable salutary effect on a patient’s health and quality of life. Therefore, HEOR analysis provides the best information for comparing and choosing treatments.
New technologies and data sources for HEOR studies
OPEN Health states that “there are three key technological drivers of rapid change in healthcare delivery and HEOR: big data, cloud-based computing, and artificial intelligence (AI).”
Big data in the pharma industry refers to the volume, variety, and velocity of information that industries can analyze to gain actionable insight into their operations. Big data and analytics allow pharma companies to process and interpret this information. This ability contributes to the increased use of big data in the drug industry.
What does the availability of big data mean for teams that produce and use HEOR findings? It’s important to understand that more data doesn’t necessarily translate to more helpful information; larger amounts of data – often stored in silos of cross-functional team members and therefore not accessible – can create confusion or overwhelm teams who hope to use it.
Fortunately, AI can help parse and analyze large amounts of data. Data must be cleaned and transformed into a helpful format for HEOR teams. AI tools like sentiment analysis and natural language processing can help humans draw insights from large amounts of structured data.
Potential for revolutionizing HEOR studies
Cutting-edge technologies like AI will undoubtedly transform how HEOR teams handle large amounts of data. But technology also has a role to play for patients, who can contribute the benefit of their lived experience to the broader picture of outcomes research.
A more patient-centric approach to HEOR might include 1:1 interviews, focus groups, message testing and feedback about proposed websites or other materials. Patients can also provide feedback about study protocols and input on the day-to-day impact of living with a disease and the result of effective treatments. As patients become more familiar with different technology to manage their health, they may contribute this input passively through wearable monitors or actively through apps or virtual discussion platforms.
Insights management technology and HEOR
The HEOR function in medical affairs thrives on insights obtained across different channels from various stakeholders. The more data they can collect, the more they will need technologies and processes that help them work more efficiently. HEOR medical affairs teams should prioritize ways to increase their effectiveness in this area, typically with the help of specialized technology.
What is insights management?
Insights management is the collection of processes around obtaining, analyzing, and sharing insights in the pharmaceutical industry. As information sources and channels proliferate, pharma teams are challenged to strike a balance between getting all the information they need and not becoming overwhelmed with the task of analyzing the information.
How does insights management relate to HEOR?
Insights management encompasses several processes, including understanding a broader disease community through various types of data, social monitoring in pharma for expert and patient conversations, scientific discussions, structured virtual conversations, and analysis of those conversations. HEOR teams might use some or all of these technologies to better understand various pharmacoeconomics or outcomes research elements.
Specific challenges of HEOR that insights management technology can solve
If the goal of health economics and outcomes research is to “help healthcare decision makers – including clinicians, governments, payers, health ministries, patients, and more – to adequately compare and choose among the available options… informed by the best scientific research derived from rigorous, proven methodologies,” organizations must put powerful technology to use capable of maximizing value and efficiency in the work. Ideally, this technology can enable teams to:
- Discover the right investigators and KOLs
- Break down data silos and integrate insights from disparate data sources
- Generate 3-7X actionable insights
- Reduce 90% of the analysis and reporting workload
HEOR teams use an insights management platform as a centralized place to capture, analyze, refine, and share insights. They can monitor social platforms for conversations about currently available treatments to understand unmet needs or engage payers or prescribers in a virtual discussion about what would prompt them to choose one treatment over another.
Within3’s insights management platform reveals the voices you haven’t heard with sophisticated disease community network analytics and powers global HCP conversations and collaboration with in-platform translation and anytime accessibility.
With Moderator Assistant, you can gain real-time summaries of ongoing conversations or research activities that enable you to act quickly with follow-up questions and discussions to drive more insights. Then, you can accelerate sharing summaries internally so you can refine team conversations before the discussion concludes.
The Moderator Assistant and insights reporting capabilities were developed specifically to create efficiencies and reduce expenses for medical affairs teams.
On top of finding and engaging the right KOLs to accelerate milestones, launch, and patient access, our latest platform updates improve the efficacy of engagement through a completely redesigned group engagement experience focused on further maximizing KOL, physician, and patient participation. The new system is based on behavioral data from 70,000+ HCP and patient advisor users and Within3’s 15 years of partnership with the world’s top 20 pharmaceutical companies.
“Our goal is to remove 90% of the work and cost from the process of gathering, analyzing, and integrating insights while at the same time improving insight quality and decision-making,” said Lance Hill, Within3 CEO.
Conclusion
Health economics and outcomes research is a critical function inside pharmaceutical companies. This is particularly true in medical affairs but includes a growing footprint outside that function. HEOR expertise is in high demand to help pharma companies develop more cost-effective treatments. More importantly, HEOR helps treatments reach the hands of more patients for positive health outcomes.
Read a client success story to learn how medical affairs HEOR teams use insights management technology. You can also book a demo to see how our insights reporting capability can work for your team.
