Ms. Bright brings over two decades of health care policy, issue management, patient advocacy, and executive leadership to the role. She is also founder and President of Momentum Health Strategies and has formerly served as executive director of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America, representing physician, advanced practice nurse, and researcher members. Ms. Bright’s prior executive leadership at the National Mental Health Association (now Mental Health America) focused on advancing policy initiatives at the state and local level. She now serves on the Board of Directors for Mental Health America. She has also done issue analysis and issues management at state-oriented lobbying firms.
You’re a panelist at the ISPOR Summit 2021, Value Assessment: New Insights, Approaches, and Applications. What did you address in your talk?
I’m part of the panel on expanding the use of patient and societal considerations in value assessment. This is IVI’s sweet spot, as patient-centricity – integrating the patient voice and experience in all aspects of our processes – along with transparency and open-source modeling are among our founding principles.
For patients to be heard in value assessment, we must do a better job of measuring the elements that patients say are important to them. Moreover, we must develop and refine all the methods to help us incorporate these perspectives inside value assessment. This is the painstaking work that IVI is leading.
Is value assessment having a moment?
It is! The Biden administration is trying to determine the best approach to improve care and lower costs, and employing value-based payments is one option under consideration. In February, the USC Schaeffer Center and the Aspen Institute issued a report calling for a national health technology assessment advisory body, which would move this huge undertaking from the private to the public sphere.
IVI’s concern in all of these important deliberations is ensuring patient-centricity, which goes back to my point about improving methods. We worry that inequities in health care delivery – which were painfully apparent as the COVID pandemic took hold – will be hard-coded into value and health technology assessment. So, it is an important moment, and IVI and its partners are doing all we can to move the field forward.
What work is IVI doing around these value assessment methods questions?
We just wrapped up the public comment phase for our major depressive disorder model scope. A new development in that work is active engagement, since the project’s inception from a multi-stakeholder, 20-member Advisory Group, comprised of patients, employers, clinicians, innovators, payers, and researchers. That input has yielded crucial insights for model design.
And we recently announced the 2021 Annual Methods Summit, a virtual event this fall, building on the success of the 2020 inaugural event. Summit participants will grapple with these crucial questions: What are the most important data inputs to represent patient preferences and patient outcomes? How can we harness this data to drive insights in patient-centered outcomes research and value assessment?
I’m proud that IVI is actively living out our principles in this work. We encourage all organizations with interest in this area to get involved – become a member, contribute your expertise to a project, share your work and findings from using our open-source platform. There are big things ahead for this field – stay tuned!
