Estimating the Value of Diagnosing and Treating Alzheimer’s Disease

Alzheimer’s disease is the seventh leading cause of death in the United States and the most common cause of dementia among older adults, according to the National Institute on Aging—and its impact is only growing. Physicians and patients are anxiously awaiting new, effective therapies, as well as improved tools for diagnosis and prevention, to combat this devastating disease.

On May 9, join a Schaeffer Center seminar to discuss the need for affordable diagnostic tests, the challenge of determining the size of the treatment-eligible population, and how innovative payment models would help ensure the healthcare system has the capacity and resources available to treat everyone.

Event Date
Monday, May 09, 2022
11:00 AM - 12:00 PM Pacific
Location

Peter J. Neumann, Sc.D. (Moderator), is Director of the Center for the Evaluation of Value and Risk in Health (CEVR) at the Institute for Clinical Research and Health Policy Studies at Tufts Medical Center, and Professor of Medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine. He is the founder and director of the Cost-Effectiveness Registry, a comprehensive database of cost-effectiveness analyses in health care. Dr. Neumann has written widely on the role of clinical and economic evidence in pharmaceutical decision making and on regulatory and reimbursement issues in health care. He served as co-chair of the 2nd Panel on Cost-Effectiveness in Health and Medicine. He is the author or co-author of over 300 papers in the medical literature, and the author or co-author of 3 books: Using Cost-Effectiveness Analysis to Improve Health Care (Oxford University Press, 2005) ; Cost-Effectiveness in Health and Medicine, 2nd Edition (Oxford University Press, 2017); The Right Price: A Value-Based Prescription for Drug Costs (Oxford University Press, 2021). Dr. Neumann has served as President of the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR). He is a member of the editorial advisory board of Health Affairs and the health policy advisory board for the Congressional Budget Office.  He has also held several policy positions in Washington, including Special Assistant to the Administrator at the Health Care Financing Administration. He received his doctorate in health policy and management from Harvard University.

Jakub Hlávka, PhD, is the Executive Director of the Healthcare Markets Initiative and Fellow at the USC Schaeffer Center. He is also a Research Assistant Professor in the Health Policy and Management Department of the Price School of Public Policy at USC. His NIH-funded research focuses on the modeling of dementia treatments and associated economic challenges, with a specific focus on Alzheimer’s disease and emerging disease-modifying therapies. His modeling of COVID-19 pandemic interventions has been supported by the CDC and DHS, and his broader research interests include innovative payment models for pharmaceuticals, health system reform and the study of inequality, with current funding from the Greenwall and PhRMA foundations. Dr. Hlávka teaches in master’s programs at the USC Price School of Public Policy and the Keck School of Medicine.

Outside of USC, Prof. Hlávka is a research consultant for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (Committee on Improving Representation of Women and Underrepresented Minorities in Clinical Trials and Research) and a member of the International Pharmacoeconomics Collaboration on Alzheimer’s Disease (IPECAD). He has additional professional experience from Genentech where he worked on R&D portfolio planning and as a consultant to the Tufts Medical Center's Center for the Evaluation of Value and Risk in Health. In volunteer capacity, he works closely with a hospital and schools serving vulnerable populations in the Dandora area of Nairobi, Kenya.

Aside from health policy and economics, he has co-authored studies in national security, aerospace and emerging technologies and has served in research and consulting roles at the Fraunhofer Society (Germany), RAND Europe in Cambridge (England), and at the Office of the Government and Ministry of Finance in Prague (Czech Republic).

Dr. Hlávka holds a PhD and MPhil from the Pardee RAND Graduate School, a master’s degree from Georgetown University, Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, and an undergraduate degree from the University of Economics in Prague.

Dr. Soeren Mattke, MD, DSc, is a Research Professor of Economics at USC and the Director of the Center for Improving Chronic Illness Care. He will be the Project Director and direct point of contact for EFPIA, supported by analysts and research assistants. Dr. Mattke is an expert in innovations to prevent, diagnose and manage chronic disease via better drugs, devices and technologies, improved delivery models and value-based payment, with over 150 published journal articles and technical reports. He is leading a program to evaluate health system preparedness for an Alzheimer’s treatment globally. This work builds on his experience at the OECD Health Policy Unit in comparative health system analysis and benchmarking.

Prior to joining USC, Dr. Mattke led RAND Health’s private sector practice and worked at the OECD in Paris, in the healthcare practice of Bain & Company in Boston, at Abt Associates, a policy consulting firm in Cambridge, MA, and at Harvard University. He trained as an internist and cardiologist at the University of Munich and got his doctoral degree in health policy at Harvard.

Yifan Wei, MPH, is a PhD student at the University of Southern California Schaeffer Center and School of Pharmacy. Her research focuses on projection of health conditions and burden of disease with quantitative methods. Her current work is around the topic of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias.

Funding for this project was made possible in part by grants P30AG066589 and R01AG062277 from the National Institute on Aging.