Nancy J. Devlin, PhD, is the Director, Centre for Health Policy, University of Melbourne in Melbourne Victoria, Australia. Previously she served as the Director of Research at the Office of Health Economics (OHE) in London, and has honorary professorships at the School of Health and Related Research at the University of Sheffield and at City University of London. She has over 30 years of experience in health economics and health outcomes research and as an advisor to healthcare organizations, both in the public and private sectors, in the United Kingdom (UK) and internationally.
Professor Devlin’s principal areas of research expertise are the measurement and valuation of patient-reported health outcomes; the cost-effectiveness thresholds used in making judgments about value for money in healthcare; use of multiple criteria decision analysis in healthcare decision making; and priority setting in healthcare.
Professor Devlin has considerable experience in senior leadership and governance roles in academic and healthcare organizations. She is Past-President of the EuroQol Group, the not-for-profit international network of researchers that developed the EQ-5D, and she served as a Director on the ISPOR Board from 2015-2017. She is non-executive Director of the UK’s Private Healthcare Information Network (PHIN), and she chairs the Scientific Advisory Committee of APERSU in Canada (Alberta PROMs and EQ-5D Research & Support Unit). Prior to joining OHE in 2009, Nancy was Professor of Economics at City University, where she was Head of the Economics Department and Dean of Social Sciences. She has also held academic positions at the University of Otago (New Zealand) and at the King’s Fund, a health policy think tank in London.
Highly regarded as a presenter and educator in health economics, Nancy was awarded the UK Higher Education Academy prize for outstanding economics lecturer (2004) and is the founder of the Health Economics Education (HEe) website.
Nancy has published over 100 original peer reviewed journal articles on a wide range of empirical and theoretical topics in health economics. She is co-author of numerous books, including Economic Analysis in Health Care, UK’s leading textbook on health economics, now in its second edition, and Using Patient Reported Outcomes to Improve Health Care, (both published by Wiley). Nancy has a PhD in Economics from the University of Otago, New Zealand.
ISPOR Vision Statement by Nancy J. Devlin, PhD
ISPOR’s growth and success as a cross-cutting, multi-disciplinary organization is a credit to astute leadership from its past and present CEOs and Presidents, and to the commitment of its board members, staff and membership around the world actively engaged in the pursuit of its mission. I would be honoured to serve as ISPOR’s President to build on those achievements, working closely with the Board of Directors, our talented CEO Nancy Berg, and ISPOR’s hardworking, hugely committed staff.
My work with ISPOR includes serving as an elected member of the Board of Directors (2015-2017); co-chairing the emerging best practices taskforce on multiple criteria decision analysis (MCDA); and active participation in ISPOR short course teaching and conferences over many years. Based on these experiences, my priorities as President would include the following:
- To ensure that we continue to grow not just the scale of our activities, but also the stature, relevance, and impact of ISPOR as an organization.
- To continue efforts to ensure that ISPOR conference plenaries and panels are representative of our membership, and that the conferences serve as opportunities to highlight and develop emerging talent and research leaders.
ISPOR has been very successful in bringing together the pharmaceutical industry, patients, academic researchers and regulators – and is possibly unique in the extent to which it has created an effective dialogue between these groups. Health technology assessment bodies are now more involved, but this model should be expanded to further engage healthcare budget holders, policy makers and healthcare systems in ISPOR’s work, as their concerns and issues are crucial to the achievement of ISPOR’s mission to improve health globally.
As a not-for-profit organization, ISPOR’s mission – to promote health economics and outcomes research excellence to improve decision making for health globally – lies at the heart of all that we do. The growth of ISPOR’s membership and conference attendance is a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. Our success ultimately lies in our impact in improving science and improving decision making. We need to do more to show, both to members and to potential members, how our resources are directed to the achievement of those ends, and to dispel impressions that ISPOR is ‘too commercial’.
I am grateful to my Office of Health Economics (OHE) colleagues and its Board of Trustees for supporting my nomination as ISPOR President and in particular their willingness to ensure that, if elected, I will have the time to dedicate to this role.