For 30 years, ISPOR has sought to promote and advance the study of health economics and outcomes research.

Rob Abbott, CEO of ISPOR, hopes to use health economics and outcomes research to have a bigger impact on improving health care.

Rob Abbott, CEO of ISPOR, has led the organization for more than two years and has worked to refine its strategic direction. The group has nearly 18,000 members in over 100 countries and touts itself as the largest professional society focused on health economics and outcomes research.

Abbott tells Chief Healthcare Executive® that he wants ISPOR to have an even bigger impact.

“I want us to be working with our members across the world to really move the needle on health care more broadly,” Abbott says. “How do we bring everything that health economics and outcomes research has to offer? How do we bring that to decision-makers so that we can actually work towards a future where healthcare globally is more accessible, more effective, more efficient, and, most importantly, affordable?”

The society examines health economics and outcomes around the world, and Abbott is leading ISPOR at a time when the United States is weighing dramatic steps to transform the government’s healthcare policies, spurring intense debate and protest.

Abbott sees this as a vital moment for ISPOR. In a recent interview, he talked about the importance of focusing on patients, identifying value, and the need for real-world evidence in examining treatments.

“From my perspective, it’s been a fantastic time to be working in the field of healthcare,” he says.

‘Skin in the game’

In America and abroad, healthcare systems are facing serious problems, he says.

“We know that healthcare systems across the globe are struggling in the face of long term sustainability and affordability,” Abbott says.

ISPOR is placing greater emphasis on its work with patients. The group recently held its first global patient summit, and Abbott says the insights “are enormously helpful.”

“What we’re trying to do is ensure that that patient expertise and experience is actually brought forward into the decision-making process,” Abbott says. “Policymakers who are admittedly faced with a bewildering array of data and information … they have to make a call. We want that call to be more informed by what patients are actually saying.”

Too often, the perspectives of patients are overlooked.

“Patients are an enormously effective source of lived experience and information and expertise,” Abbott says.

Patients can offer insights from their own experience with a drug or a treatment protocol. Those insights can help ISPOR offer guidance that aren’t just theoretical or even tested in a laboratory, but informed by patients.

“What I find incredibly inspiring actually, are their stories of how they’ve been faring well while taking the drug,” Abbott says. “What have the side effects been? What has it meant in terms of their ability to live lives of greater abundance and opportunity?”“Because this is the thing. We’re all patients. We’ve either been a patient in the past, or we’ll be a patient in the future. We have a loved one who’s a patient. We’ve all got skin in the game here.”

Focusing on value

For Abbott, examining the effectiveness of treatments and health policies requires analyzing value.

“It’s fundamentally about value, and value can mean many things,” he says. “Value can mean: is the drug or treatment accessible? Is it affordable? Does it actually do what we hope it will do?”

Employers paying for health coverage are increasingly concerned about value, Abbott says.

They’re frustrated with rising costs, but more concerned about whether they’re getting appropriate value for what they’re paying for coverage.

“Virtually every employer that I talk to is acknowledging that healthcare costs, or the cost of providing coverage to employees, is something that is rising too quickly,” he says. “And if there’s a perception that the value isn’t there, that the employee is not coming back or not coming back quickly enough, then that becomes a real issue.”

Abbott sees growing demands for price transparency in health systems, and greater understanding as to why prices are rising or why there are different prices at different providers.

“I think that what we want to be moving towards is a healthcare system that is predicated on the creation of value,” he says.

Real-world evidence

In examining the benefits of drugs and treatments, Abbott repeatedly points to the need for “real-world evidence,” which he says is becoming utilized more in decision-making. In ISPOR’s biennial report on the top trends of health economics, real-world evidence topped the list.

“Real-world evidence has come to the fore in a way that I think few of us 10 years ago would have imagined,” Abbott says.

“We need to pay attention to the actual experience as reported by patients, and that needs to supplement whatever the outcome of the clinical trial might have been. That needs to be informing pricing decisions,” Abbott says.

For a long time, many believed that the results of a clinical trial represented the last word on a drug, but Abbott says that has changed.

“I think that what we began to observe is that not all of these drugs that pass through the clinical trial deliver the benefit that we expected,” he says.

Even in a well-designed study, the trial involves a sample of a much larger population. As a treatment is delivered to a wider group of patients, there’s more evidence to consider.

There could be unexpected side effects, or the treatment may not work as well as originally envisioned in certain groups. In recent years, there’s more attention being paid to the real-world results of treatment, he says.

“This is something that has been emerging over the last five to 10 years,” he says.

AI and equity

The acceleration of digital health, and the wider utilization of artificial intelligence in healthcare, are promising developments that Abbott is watching.

“Artificial intelligence is showing tremendous promise in areas like rapid data mining to help tailor treatment protocols,” he says.

There’s growing excitement about AI, but he says it’s important to recognize it’s not a silver bullet that will solve the problems of healthcare.

“At the end of the day, we need artificial intelligence and we need human intelligence. Human intelligence ultimately needs to be driving this metaphorical bus,” he says.

He’s also encouraged by the growing attention to the concept of “whole health,” including physical and mental health.

ISPOR will also continue to focus on health equity. Abbott says he wants to leverage health economics and outcomes research to bring the best medical science has to offer to the largest number of people, at reasonable costs.

“Health equity is something that is absolutely foundational to everything we do,” Abbott says.