Health Economics
Health Economics and Outcomes Research
Headed by Shi Luming
Our supports to Health Economics and Outcomes Research comprise:
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Project collaboration by providing pre- and post- grand supports
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Evaluation of health services programmes
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Development of disease registries
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Real-world data analytics
Our team’s core functions mainly cover 4 key areas:
Project Collaboration - Our HEOR team has extensive experience in collaborating with clinical domain experts to develop quality protocols for health economics and outcomes research projects, especially for multi-centre studies. We advise on all aspects of protocol design to meet regulatory and funding requirements. We are among the first pioneer teams to incorporate health economics evaluation into grant applications. With our team’s background in medicine as well as strong clinical research foundations, we are the clinicians’ ideal partner to help them quickly translate a research question into a valid and feasible research plan. HEOR investigations not only improve the potential to provide the best care at the lowest cost to our patients but also influence the formation of healthcare policies relevant to our population’s needs.
Our HEOR department forms the nucleus of health economic evaluation expertise at SCRI. We provide technical support and demonstrate scientific leadership to help local clinical researchers incorporate health economics evaluation into their research projects. We supported many health outcomes projects in different therapeutic areas. Our senior members possess many years of experience in handling real world patient data from hospitals, disease registries, and administrative data from MOH. In addition, we are expanding our training services to cover emerging fields in health outcomes research and health technology assessment, such as health services evaluation, digital health and diagnostic test accuracy research. With these initiatives in place, we hope to equip local researchers to meet the future demand for knowledge on patient outcomes and value-added health services.
Consultancy support - We work closely with hospital research departments and institutes to build up their research capabilities, widen the talent pipelines and grow a larger pool of committed and skilled research professionals, which will especially benefit young/new investigators, so that they can begin their research journey more confidently.
Scientific Review - Due to our wide exposure to clinical research projects, we are recognized and well respected as experienced methodologists. We received numerous invites to review grant applications, journal manuscripts, conference abstracts and theses of post-graduate students. Some project teams had invited us to collaborate with them after receiving our review comments and recommendations.
Training Workshops – To nurture clinical research capabilities and introduce new methods and skills to the local research community in a timely manner, we were the first team in Singapore to provide Health Economics Evaluation alongside Clinical Studies and Network Meta-analysis workshops. We also brought in and introduced the Cochrane method on Diagnostic Test Accuracy (DTA) evidence synthesis to Singapore in the same year when it was established by the Cochrane DTA Group. All our workshops were well attended, and we received very positive feedback from our participants. Our participants included staff members from ACE (MOH), NUS, Duke-NUS, and LKCSoM. Many of the attendees were clinicians, nurses, and researchers by vocation from public healthcare organizations.