Rok Hren, PhD, MSc IHP (HE) is currently a Head of Laboratory Diagnostics, Point.of.Care and Molecular Diagnostics in the Adriatic Region within Siemens Healthineers and has more than 15 years of commercial experience in the pharmaceutical industry, with more than 12 years on a board level in both (i) line management, which has included full P&L responsibility for operations in Slovenia and Romania, and (ii) leadership regional functions in Central and Eastern Europe. He has also served as the Assistant Professor at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and as a Director of a consulting company, Hren & Partner doo, Slovenia.
He is President of the ISPOR Slovenia Regional Chapter, a Chair of the ISPOR Central and Eastern Europe Consortium Research Committee, and a member of the ISPOR Health Science Policy Council Science and Research Committee.
He was a faculty member of the ISPOR Short Course Program "Risk-Sharing/Performance-Based Arrangements in Central and Eastern Europe: Implementation of Managed Entry Agreements" at the ISPOR 18th, 19th, and 20th Annual European Congresses, and a co-chair of the ISPOR Research Review Committee at the ISPOR 19th and 20th Annual European Congresses. He was also a Congress President of the 6th Adriatic Congress of Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research in 2016.
He is the recipient of the following awards in the field of health policy and health economics:
- 2016 Outstanding Paper Award at the 35th International Conference on Organizational Science Development for the research paper A Srakar, R Hren, V Rupel Prevolnik “Health services utilization in older Europeans: an empirical study”. Proceedings of the 35th International Conference on Organizational Science Development, pp 997-1009, 2016.
- 2015 ISPOR ‘Value in Health Regional Issues Excellent Article Award’ for the research paper R Hren “Impact of the Pharma-Economic Act on Diffusion of Innovation and Reduction of Costs in the Hungarian Prescription Drug Market (2007–2010)”. Value in Health Regional Issues, 2 (2013) 290-299.
He received his PhD in Physiology and Biophysics from Dalhousie University, Canada and an MSc in International Health Policy (Health Economics) with Distinction from London School of Economics and Political Science, UK, while he was a post-doctoral Fellow at Nora Eccles Harrison Cardiovascular Research and Training Institute, University of Utah Medical School, USA. In total, his publications gathered 352/457 citations (excluding self-citations) in WoS/Scopus databases (as of January 19, 2018).
ISPOR Vision Statement by Rok Hren, PhD, MSc IHP (HE)
Pharmacoeconomics has nowadays, at least in some parts of the globe, come of age. And this coming of age is to a large extent due to the contribution of ISPOR massively expanding methodological and research frontiers and efficiently engaging stakeholders from diverse backgrounds. It is a great honor to work within such a prestigious organization that can count among its many achievements the contribution toward informational symmetry and transparency in healthcare.
If elected as a Board of Directors member, I will strive to focus on 3 key areas.
Firstly, I will work to apply the advances in pharmacoeconomics to the so-called mid-income countries. In those jurisdictions, economical resources devoted to healthcare are relatively scarce and for this reason alone, the application of health economics rigor should be of even higher priority than in the high-income countries.
Secondly, there is a huge gap in health economics evaluation of pharmaceuticals versus medical devices, diagnostics, and imaging. While these technologies account for a large portion of healthcare budgets, they remain undernourished when it comes to a systematic research. I will work to use key learnings from pharmacoeconomics, sometimes even in the most pragmatic way, to accelerate progress in research and policy making for medical devices, diagnostics, and imaging.
Thirdly, public procurement that is built on the first principles of health economics presents a laudable goal, but whose implementation is often, if not usually, lacking. Financial and technical specifications of vendors are frequently defined ad-hoc with much room left for various stakeholders to shape specifications according to their particular interests. I will work to reshape public procurement methodologies by adapting the valuable findings from the field of pharmacoeconomics.
In summary, I strongly believe that ISPOR has in its leadership role throughout the years accumulated knowledge, which can now be expanded in 3 directions: geographically, across healthcare sectors, and across decision-making processes.