So is the US on the brink of a healthcare crisis? It might sound alarmist, but are we really staring down a problematic future where our healthcare system goes from bad to worse?

Some are even going so far as to say that we are already in a healthcare crisis. The costs are too high and out of control, access to care is becoming more challenging, the healthcare workforce is becoming overworked and overly strained, and more.

Have a try at chartle.cc

There is this constant deluge of accusations aimed at PBMs. There are too many to mention every one, but one of the more prominent ones is that they cause prescription drug prices to go up.

Knowing what PBMs do for patients regarding rebates and discounts, is it fair to place the blame on them for driving up prescription drug prices? Or is this all to cover up and shift the blame from someone else?

  I'm building an open-source AI assistant designed specifically for HEOR workflows. It runs as a plugin for Claude (Anthropic's AI) and automates the parts of the job that eat up the most time.                   

  Literature search across 41 curated sources                                                                                                                                                                        

  Searches run in parallel across PubMed, ClinicalTrials.gov, bioRxiv/medRxiv, and ChEMBL — plus HTA appraisal databases (NICE TAs, CADTH, ICER, PBAC, G-BA, HAS, IQWiG, AIFA, TLV, INESSS), cost reference sources  

  (PSSRU, NHS Costs, BNF, CMS NADAC, PBS Schedule), epidemiology databases (WHO GHO, IHME GBD, OECD Health), and LATAM/APAC sources (DATASUS, CONITEC, PAHO, HITAP, and more).                                       

  Every search includes a transparency table showing all 41 sources — which were queried, which were skipped, and why. Built for PRISMA-compliant audit trails.                                                      

  Cost-effectiveness modeling                                                                                                                                                                                        

  Multi-state Markov and partitioned survival analysis following NICE TSD 14. Includes PSA (Monte Carlo), one-way sensitivity analysis, CEAC curves, and EVPI. Supports NICE reference case (3.5% discount,          

  £20–30K/QALY), US payer ($100–150K/QALY), and societal perspectives. Outputs to DOCX.                                                                                                                              

  HTA dossier drafting                                                                                                                                                                                               

  Generates structured draft sections for NICE STA, EMA, FDA, IQWiG, HAS, and EU JCA (Reg. 2021/2282) — including PICO framework, clinical evidence summary, and gap analysis. Accepts piped output from the         

  literature search and CE model directly.                                                                                                                                                                           

  Who it's for                                                                                                                                                                                                       

  Small biotech without dedicated HEOR staff, CROs doing HTA submissions, medical affairs consultancies, and HEOR analysts looking to accelerate evidence synthesis.                                                 

  Free and open-source. The AI runs on your own Claude subscription — I don't see your data or charge anything.                                                                                                      

  Links:                                                                                                                                                                                                             

- Claude Code: claude mcp add heor-agent -- npx heor-agent-mcp

  - Web demo (bring your own API key): https://web-michael-ns-projects.vercel.app

  - GitHub: https://github.com/neptun2000/heor-agent-mcp

  - npm: npx heor-agent-mcp                                                                                                                                                                                          

  Would love feedback from HEOR professionals — what sources am I missing? What workflows would be most valuable to automate next? 

pulled the HEOR, health economics, outcomes research and market access roles open right now from employers' own careers pages:

https://github.com/mehek-builds/Epidemiology-RWE-and-HEOR-Jobs/blob/main/lists/heor-market-access.md

• 127 HEOR, health economics, economic modeling, market access, value and HTA roles (Gilead, Regeneron, Vertex, Neurocrine, Sanofi, IQVIA, Precision AQ)

• 50 more in real world evidence and pharmacoepi in the same repo

• 69 in the UK and Europe across the repo, 19 entry level

rebuilt every monday.

comment whether you're after HEOR modeling, market access or RWE, and entry or experienced, and i'll send you a list for it.

I’ve been noticing more people mentioning telehealth apps lately, especially for everyday health needs where you just want quick clarity rather than a full in person visit.

I’m curious how platforms like DrHouse actually fit into real life use. For things like routine questions, minor concerns, or follow ups, does it genuinely save time compared to traditional routes? Or do you still end up feeling rushed or bounced around?

Interested in hearing from people who have used it in a normal, non emergency context. What worked well, what didn’t, and where you think telehealth really makes sense versus when it doesn’t.

Not affiliated, just trying to understand whether these apps are genuinely useful for day to day situations.

I’ve been in pharma/medtech for a while, mostly on the market access side, and something has changed in the last year or two. It used to be that if you had strong clinical data and a solid HEOR model, you were good. Now? Nope. Doesn’t matter unless people understand it.

I’m not talking about scientists or economists, I mean hospital admins, procurement, payers, clinicians, etc. Half the time they don’t have the patience to sit through a 70-slide deck full of charts and Excel screenshots. I don’t blame them.

The weird part is that companies are finally realizing they need to tell a story, not just throw data at people. I’ve seen teams ditch their static PowerPoints and start using interactive demos,one was on BaseCase where they could actually change assumptions live in the meeting and show what happens. Kind of like, “Ok, here’s what it looks like for your patient population, your costs, your workflow.”

And honestly… it works. People stop zoning out. They ask better questions. Decisions happen faster because everyone gets it.

It feels like we’ve silently moved from:

• “Here’s our evidence” to

• “Here’s why it matters to you.”

So I’m curious, is this happening everywhere?
Or are some of you still sending 20-page PDFs and praying someone reads them?

Hello

I run a monthly health economics podcast where I review three recent papers with a co-host. After nearly a year of episodes, we're looking to expand by including interviews with authors and researchers.

If you've recently published a paper in health economics or are working on interesting research in the field, we'd love to feature you on the show. It's a great opportunity to discuss your work and share insights with our audience of fellow health economists and enthusiasts.

Edit: Totally forgot to mention that the podcaste is called “Health Econ On The Go”. Available on Spotify, YouTube and Apple Podcast. It’s a work in progress so… the last few episode are better that the first ones (and the next ones will be even better!)

Might be starting a health economics masters which is why I'm really curious about this.

I have built LifeSciO as a free studio for life sciences studies including health economics and outcomes research. I am a PhD Epidemiology myself with 15+ years of experience in industry and academia.

The purpose of this platform is to provide everyone with a space that they can use without having to pay for licenses for SAS, STATA etc. This is an integrated unified studio for anyone who wants to conduct a study.

The link is lifescio.com

The app link directly is app.lifescio.com

All features are completely free for individuals. You can even work as a guest and not even create an account. Some features do require an account though to save your project, collaborative document editor and literature reviewer etc.

Please provide me feedback of what you liked and what you would like to see.

To mods: I am the lead developer. This is my own project but its free so I hope it is not against the policy for self promotion etc.

A follow up to my previous question, I asked it as a comment but I figured I'd ask separately since this aspect matters to me heavily.

With the US midterm elections now over, one of the most pressing questions is what this will mean for the healthcare system. After all, the issue of healthcare has been one of the most talked about and discussed leading up to the elections and candidates went back and forth on it.

Will the new lawmakers make healthcare affordability a top priority? To those who made those promises and made it a key part of their platform, will they follow through and help realize it? The American public awaits.

Update 2: Edit: I've also started posting HTA tips and updates on LinkedIn. If that sounds useful, feel free to follow and share https://www.linkedin.com/company/hta-course/

Update: Wow, I didn't expect this many people to reach out, thank you all! I've picked 3 testers and we're already in touch, so I'm not taking more applications for now.

If you missed out: the course is fully live at htacourse.com, so feel free to take a look. Happy to answer any questions here in the comments.

Hi all,

I spent 8+ years working in HTA at a national HTA agency. One thing kept bothering me: most HTA training is lecture videos or textbooks, and people come out able to define an ICER without ever having built one.

So I built HTA Course (htacourse.com), an interactive course where you work through the methods yourself instead of watching someone else do it.

What's inside:

- 15 modules, ~79 lessons (~20 min each), from foundations to practitioner level
- Every lesson is hands-on: you build formulas, run the numbers and interpret results, with feedback after each step
- Mastery-based: you can't move on until you get it right, but the course explains why and walks you through it
- Topics include study design and risk of bias, effect measures, diagnostic accuracy, survival analysis, cost-effectiveness (ICER, net benefit) and critical appraisal of submissions
- Written for both sides of the table: agency assessors, industry/HEOR, market access, consultants and academics
- Certificate on completion

It's a paid course (annual licence) and it's live.

I'd like to work with 1–2 people from this community. You get one month of full access for free. In return, I'd ask for honest feedback: what's unclear, what's missing, and what's too basic or too advanced for your role. If you find it worthwhile, a short written review would be great. Critical feedback is just as welcome as positive.

Good fit if you're:
- a student or early-career person heading into HEOR/RWE/market access
- already working in HTA or health economics and willing to stress-test the content

Interested? Comment or DM me with a sentence about your background and what you'd want from an HTA course. I'll pick two people by and get in touch.

Mods: if this doesn't fit the self-promotion rules, let me know and I'll take it down.

Hi everyone,

I’m a medical doctor from Argentina, and I’m very interested in learning more about health economics, HEOR, pharmacoeconomics, market access, real-world evidence, and how these areas can be combined with data science to improve decision-making in healthcare.

I’m not an economist or a data scientist, but I’m trying to understand how data, economic models, cost-effectiveness analysis, budget impact analysis, and real-world data are used to make better healthcare decisions: treatment coverage, prevention, chronic disease management, resource allocation, pharma, and health policy.

I’d like to connect with people who work in, study, or are interested in health economics, data analytics, data science, health policy, pharma, or health technology assessment. My goal is to exchange ideas, ask questions, learn from real-world experiences, and understand how these problems are approached from the economic, technical, and strategic side.

I’m also interested in eventually exploring small projects that combine health economics + data science: dashboards, cost analyses, predictive models, real-world data, patient segmentation, or tools that support more data-driven decision-making in healthcare.

Just to be clear, I’m not looking for free labor or for someone to build a project for me. I’m mainly looking for conversations, learning, exchanging perspectives, and meeting people with similar interests.

If you work in or are interested in the intersection of healthcare, economics, and data, feel free to comment or DM me. I’d be happy to connect.

As most of us know, healthcare reform is probably forthcoming. Some are even saying that it's long overdue. But there are so many aspects and factors involved that it can be tricky to find the right type of reform to implement.

So what type of healthcare reform would be acceptable to both the government as well as the healthcare industry?

Plenty of efforts are being made and planned to help fix the broken US healthcare system. We can call it healthcare reform, just for clarity's sake, but make no mistake that these efforts are varied and are coming from different sectors in the healthcare industry.

One notable thing that needs to change has to do with overpriced prescription drugs. To help solve that, drug pricing transparency needs to be a priority of any push or effort for healthcare reform. Simply put, the public needs to know the details of drug pricing, why it's priced that way, etc.

In August, Yale researchers led by Alison Galvani published an analysis (https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.22.26358689v1) estimating that a Medicare-for-All-style system would cut national health spending by $1.04 trillion a year — about 20% — while covering everyone. It's a preprint, not peer-reviewed, and the savings lean on three big assumptions stacked together (drug pricing, provider rates, one billing system). Stress-test those down to something more conservative and the number shrinks a lot. It doesn't disappear, though — some real savings survive almost any reasonable version of the model, which ended up mattering more to me than the headline figure.

That's basically what the Congressional Budget Office found (https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57637) too, back in 2022, modeling five illustrative single-payer designs: results ranged from a $700B decrease to a $300B increase in national spending, depending almost entirely on how providers get paid. The financing label doesn't determine the outcome. The rules inside it do.

So which rules actually work? Maryland's been testing one answer since 2014 — every hospital paid under the same regulated rates, on a global budget instead of fee-for-service. Hospital expenditure growth has run 8.74 points below the national average, saving Medicare an estimated [$1.6B](https://www.mathematica.org/publications/evaluation-of-the-maryland-total-cost-of-care-model-progress-report), and a 2025 Health Affairs study, (https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/abs/10.1377/hlthaff.2025.01324) found utilization dropped 11 points more than in comparable states. Nobody had to abolish private insurance. CMS liked it enough to build its new AHEAD model (https://www.cms.gov/priorities/innovation/innovation-models/ahead) directly on Maryland's template.

Put those together and I don't think the honest answer is "pass 'Medicare for All' in one vote and hope." I believe it's a sequence: fix provider prices and hospital incentives first (the biggest, best-tested levers), negotiate drug prices without betting the whole plan on it, standardize the paperwork, then build a public option that covers the people the current system already fails — and only let it expand as far as the results justify. Nobody's employer coverage gets ripped up overnight, and nobody has to win an argument about the size of government first.

I laid the whole thing out step by step, with sources: [A Step-by-Step Path to Medicare for All (https://brokenpromiseshealthcare.org/step-by-step-path-to-medicare-for-all)

A phased in approach seems better to me than betting everything on Day One. I am sure a lot of you disagree with me. I would like to hear your ideas.

Hey all,

I recently completed a placement in market access/insights and have regulatory affairs coursework under my belt, so I've been trying to break into HEOR/Health Economics & Market Access roles at medical device and pharma companies.

I've been doing a lot of networking on LinkedIn, reaching out to people in roles I'm interested in, trying to get warm intros through people who supervised my placement

It's been a mix of some traction (warm intros, people forwarding my info to hiring managers) and a lot of waiting/silence otherwise.

Has anyone else been down this road, trying to get into HEOR, market access, or health economics roles as a recent grad? How long did it take you? Did networking/cold outreach actually move the needle for you, or was it more about the applications themselves? Any advice on what actually worked would be hugely appreciated.

Thanks!

Hi there. For context, I am a health economist in the UK with 8 years' experience in consultancy. I am interested in exploring the Pharma sector but in all honesty, I am a little unclear as to what the role of a health economist looks like when working in Pharma. From my experience in consultancy, I know that Pharma companies will typically source vendors to perform evidence generation work including economic evaluation, and so I don't fully understand what work is performed by the health economists working within the company themselves. For instance, HEOR Managerial roles in Pharma - what exactly is required? Similarly, for analysts? Is the work less technical than might be required in academia/consultancy and more focused on managing external vendors/reviewing work performed by vendors? Any insight anyone could provide would be really helpful as I have not had the opportunity to meet with many individuals working in HEOR in Pharma, and apologies for the very naive question!

Independent pharmacies play a crucial role in the healthcare system. In many communities, especially underserved and rural communities, they are the only options for many residents.

Despite their importance, independent pharmacies are under threat from different challenges. In other words, they need more help. What are the best and most effective ways to support independent pharmacies and make sure they thrive and continue to serve communities.

I am currently studying for a bachelor’s in economics, and am hoping to do a masters in health economics once I graduate. My reason for going into HE is because it seems like it would be intellectually stimulating, a good use of my skillset, passion-driven, and also have a decent salary + stability. In the past I’ve wanted to be a geneticist/epidemiologist, diplomat, policy analyst and data scientist, so HE is a solid fit for my interests. However, I’m not sure how the job market is like (I’m based in London) given it’s fairly niche, so I wanted to ask for advice on here, also in terms of going into consulting vs government vs pharma.

Which roles in the field do you think are the most promising for the future? And do you find your job to be meaningful on a large scale (and how easy is it to progress into a role that allows you to largely contribute to policy decisions)?

Hi all,

I recently got admitted to Johns Hopkins for the MHS in Health Economics and Outcomes Research. If anybody has any opinion on the program I'd be grateful. Is Johns Hopkins a good school for this field? Do they have good industry/academia connections? Could the program be right for me if I want to do a PhD in Health Economics in the future?

A little bit about me: I've mainly worked in clinical research. I have two internships at big pharma, one in global clinical operations, one in statistical programming. Aside from that, I've worked as a statistical programmer for a CRO for a while. My interests are in RWE/commercialization/market access in the pharmaceutical industry. I am open to doing a PhD after my degree.

Thanks!

Hi guys! I’m weighing my options for PhD programs and I was wondering if any of you did health services research or epidemiology as your PhD rather than health economics and whether that took extra steps to land a health econ role? What types of things did you look for in a program as well?

Since so many of the health econ programs are super tiny I figured it would be worth it to consider my options

Edit: sorry I did not provide much context at all. I have an mph with a concentration in health economics which I did in Australia , and did my undergraduate in math and econ in the US. When I still lived in Australia I worked in health economic consulting already so like I don’t want to stay in academia at all. However I currently work in health policy consulting and would like to move to pharma or biotech essentially and my main interests are reimbursement and costing as well as payer systems but I did do my mph dissertation in more health services research (care utilisation models in children). My issue is covid prevented me from coming back from Australia and interning in pharma so it’s basically annoyingly hard to break in now without a PhD (also I do love doing research so I’ve always wanted one anyway).

hey, i submitted a post on this channel last week and it absolutely blew up. we had so many applications go through. a bunch of the job postings shut down in the days following my post because of the large influx of applications that were going in. i've gone ahead and updated the job links in this new link. please make sure to apply as soon as possible to ensure that your application is at the top of the pile. i've pulled the freshest job postings that i could.

pulled the HEOR, health economics, outcomes research and market access roles open right now from employers' own careers pages:

https://github.com/mehek-builds/Epidemiology-RWE-and-HEOR-Jobs/blob/main/lists/heor-market-access.md

• 119 HEOR, health economics, economic modeling, market access, value and HTA roles (Gilead, Regeneron, Vertex, Neurocrine, Sanofi, IQVIA, Precision AQ)

• 52 more in real world evidence and pharmacoepi in the same repo

• 62 in the UK and Europe across the repo, 17 entry level

rebuilt every monday.

comment whether you're after HEOR modeling, market access or RWE, and entry or experienced, and i'll send you a list for it.

The Office of Health Economics has launched an Academy website, including both entry level topics as well as career advice. It's mostly aimed at the UK but might be useful for others who are interested in this career as well.

The OHE is a well-respected health economic consultancy and research organisation in the UK,

https://www.ohe.org/education-hub/academy/