Access Through Evidence

Our approach to solving the complex challenges our sponsors face starts with a clear understanding of the environment in which a health care intervention will be offered. Questions we usually ask ourselves and our sponsors at the beginning of any project include: Who are the various customers for the new technology? What decision making power do these customers have? What are their unmet needs? How do they evaluate whether a given technology meets their needs?

Once answers to these questions have been identified, we seek to define comprehensively the clinical, economic, and humanistic profile of the new health care intervention under consideration.

The key question then is to determine whether this profile will likely meet the needs and expectations of the customers as identified as part of the above environment assessment. Should the product profile be modified to meet the needs of the end users? Are decision makers aware of the unmet needs experienced by patients? Depending on the answers to the questions asked during this gap analysis, various tailored strategic and tactical recommendations for health economics and outcomes research activities can be identified.

The above process is an iterative one. In other words, the central component of the process, the gap analysis, is routinely re-evaluated against the changing environment and evolving product profile.

Some of our sponsors ask us to develop “soup-to-nuts” programs, where we start with the environment assessment, followed by a critical evaluation of the product profile and a gap analysis, a strategic and tactical health economic and outcomes research plan, and finally its implementations and the dissemination of the results.

In other cases, sponsors also ask us to focus our efforts exclusively on just one of the above components. For instance, we can develop stand alone market environment and gap analyses, which can include formal payer and pricing research. We also naturally can conduct the research associated with the implementation of a given set of strategic and/or tactical recommendations. Whichever the task at hand, however, our approach remains grounded in the above process.