London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

Precision medicine aims to identify the right treatment for the right patients (sometimes at the right time). This goal raises major concerns for health care systems and reimbursement agencies. For example, precision insurance coverage for treatments is often impractical. Despite being stuck in the world of binary coverage decisions, Prof Basu will talk about how assessments of value and insurance coverage, can reflect evidence of heterogeneous treatment effects, and inform moves towards precision medicine.

Professor Anirban Basu  is a professor in the Departments of Health Services and Pharmacy at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is also a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Dr. Basu’s research interests lie in revealing heterogeneity in clinical and economic outcomes in order to establish the value of individualized care. His work has focused on translating such information for public policy using innovative methods in comparative effectiveness and cost-effectiveness research.

Dr. Basu has developed methods dealing with issues related to modeling health expenditure data, which is renowned for its idiosyncrasies and the difficulties it poses for applied health services researchers. He has also worked on methods used for making causal inferences using observational data. His applied work spans many dimensions that include analyzing the cost-effectiveness of prostate cancer treatments, establishing the value of individualized care based on patient preferences, developing models to predict quality of life of patients with multiple comorbidities, measuring the effect of patients’ health on the quality of life of their partners, developing novel methods to estimate long-term costs of prostate cancer therapies, estimating the future value of research in diagnosing and finding a cure for Duchenne muscular dystrophy, developing simulation models for evaluating the cost-effectiveness of pharmacological treatment algorithms in schizophrenia, and comparative effectiveness research on the dynamic intensification of glucose lowering therapies in diabetes.

Dr. Basu is an Associate Editor for both Health Economics and the Journal of Health Economics and has taught courses on decision analysis, cost-effectiveness analysis and health services research methods. He has received numerous recognitions for his work throughout his career and for which he remains grateful to his mentors and peers: the NARSAD Wodecroft Young Investigator Award (2005), the Research Excellence Award for Methodological Excellence (2007) and the Bernie O’Brien New Investigator Award (2009) from the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research, the Alan Williams Health Economics Fellowship (2008) from the University of York, UK and the Labelle Lectureship in Health Economics (2009) from McMaster University, Canada.

Please note that this session will NOT be live-streamed/recorded.