Cytel Blog

Virtual ISPOR 2020, held November 16 to 19, presented new opportunities for scientific interaction amongst HEOR community. Cytel and Ingress Health, now a Cytel company, contributed to a range of events including interactive workshops, issue panels, on demand podium presentations and virtual poster presentations.

Continue reading for discussions on tracking COVID-19 trials, reflecting on the successes, opportunities and failures of real world solutions, and bridging the gap between real world data and clinical development.

In oncology, many manufacturers go into niche indications, where there are very specific tumors, and then they opt for a single arm trial. This potentially works for regulatory purposes (EMA/FDA). However, if they go to the local HTA authorities (NICE/CADTH), they will have to answer the question on the relative effectiveness of the new product compared to the standard of care in that country, and then its cost-effectiveness. Hence, typically, a manufacturer will identify a publication on a trial or real-world evidence on standard of care, or perhaps collect individual patient level data in clinical practice. Subsequently, it will conduct comparative effectiveness analyses for HTA purposes, a naïve comparison or an unanchored MAIC/STC/PSM of the single arm trial compared with the control arm.

In this two-part blog series, we interview Bart Heeg, Vice President HEOR and Founder at Ingress Health (A Cytel company). Bart provides us insights on the trends in HEOR and explains why Bayesian methods are also important for Health Economics. Read Part 1 here.

In this interview with Thomas Wilke, Principal Scientist at Ingress-Health (a Cytel company), we talk to him about his background and experience in Health Economics, understand the important considerations of real-world evidence studies and the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on the work of the health economics outcomes researchers who work at Ingress and Cytel. We also cover important HEOR topics such as its benefits for market access studies and real-world analytics (RWA) for regulatory submission.

Cytel and Ingress-Health will be contributing to a range of events at Virtual ISPOR EU 2020, on November 16th – November 19th. Our Real-World analytics teams will be collaborating to deliver a number of interactive workshops, issue panels, posters and podiums to showcase their work and share innovative insights in HEOR, evidence generation, knowledge synthesis and decision analysis.

Click below to download our full list of sessions at ISPOR EU

A credible evidence base is needed to support and document the economic value of new technologies and therapeutic approaches. Companies need careful cost-effectiveness analyses for successful reimbursement submissions. In this two-part blog series, we interview Bart Heeg, Vice President HEOR and Founder at Ingress Health (A Cytel company). Bart talks about his background in HEOR, founding Ingress Health and its recent acquisition by Cytel. He also talks about the benefits of turning to an HEOR specialist and provides a sneak peek into Cytel’s presentations at the upcoming ISPOR EU 2020 event.

The combination of greater access to electronic health records, bigger electronic claims datasets, and the need for more clinical insight in ensuring patient safety, has made observational studies an important new tool in trial design. Observational studies typically take non-randomized data from outside of a trial and use quantitative and modeling techniques to draw conclusions from big datasets. While typically used for HEOR and market access, augmenting regulatory submissions with observational studies is gaining prominence. As with all data analyses, there is an implicit rule of ‘garbage in-garbage out,’ where data that is not up to the standard required for the formation of sound scientific judgment, should not be used. Sponsors should rely on the most sophisticated tools and advanced analytics to make the most rigorous use of available data.