UCSD Pharmacy Student Receives ISPOR Student Conference Grant
by Olivia Yip (P3)
Olivia Yip (P3) was awarded the ISPOR Europe 2022 Conference Grant for the ISPOR Europe 2022 meeting, which was held virtually and in-person at Vienna, Austria. The conference grant covered registration, 8 hours of short courses, and a 1-year membership to ISPOR—The Professional Society for Health Economics and Outcomes Research. Although Olivia did not attend in-person, she was able to participate in virtual short courses and sessions.
Short courses are designed to introduce and expand complex methods and topics in Health Technology Assessment (HTA) for applications to healthcare systems and research. Olivia attended the short courses “Metamodeling for Simulation-Based Optimization of Strategies in Healthcare” and “Study Design with Real-World Data,” where she learned about the reduction of computational burden of optimization algorithms using metamodels and various strategies to study clinical outcomes outside of conventional randomized clinical trials, respectively.
Olivia also attended several sessions at the ISPOR meeting where the main theme was “Collaborating Across Borders: Building & Using Evidence to Enable Access.” One session that Olivia attended was “Improving Heath Technology Assessment in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.” This panel discussed major challenges facing HTA agencies in lower-income countries. The moderator and three panelists provided important recommendations, such as learning from successful implementations (and failures) of other countries to maximize health gains from a given budget.
Outside of her attendance at the ISPOR Europe 2022 conference, Olivia has made significant contributions to ISPOR by participating in the ISPOR Taxonomy Project (which is led by UCSD Dr. Mark Bounthavong) and serving as a peer reviewer for Value In Health, the society’s main peer-reviewed journal. Olivia has also presented her work, “Cost-utility analysis of academic detailing outreach on naloxone prescribing for patients at-risk for opioid-related overdose or death,” at a previous ISPOR meeting in May 2022.
Olivia is grateful for this honor and is looking forward to attending ISPOR 2023 in Boston, MA, where she plans to present more of her modeling research, cultivate her network, and expand her experience in health economics and outcomes research.
ISPOR—The Professional Society for Health Economics and Outcomes Research, is an international, non-profit professional organization dedicated to promoting “health economics and outcomes research excellence to improve decision making for health globally.” With over 14,000 members representing over 100 countries across the globe, ISPOR has been influential in directing healthcare decision-making and policy based on a solid foundation of empirical research and methodologies.