Welcoming Lewis Ruff, Senior Director, Global HEOR, within our policy, access, value, and evidence capability

We are pleased to welcome Lewis Ruff to his new role, Senior Director, Global HEOR within our policy, access, value, and evidence capability. In this update, Lewis shares his thoughts on why the growing complexity within evidence requirements is demanding a fresh approach and explains how he will be helping our clients achieve success by connecting technical HEOR expertise with strategic understanding.

Connecting technical and commercial strategies to achieve most value for our clients.

I am excited to be joining the global policy, access, value, and evidence team having spent the past decade and a half working within a range of organizations— from larger contract research organisations, to branding and advertising, to boutique technical health economic consultancies. Most recently, I lead a global health economics practice that delivered modeling, statistical, and real-world evidence tools, studies, and projects.

Prior to entering this industry, my background was within biotechnology and molecular and genetic medicine, conducting clinical research into cardiovascular disease and nephrology—however, I have always had a love for mathematics and data analysis.

My analytical and logical mindset led me swiftly towards health economics in particular; I have continued down that path ever since but have been involved in a range of other disciplines including market access, value communication, and digital applications. I’m a strong believer that our clients achieve the most value when strategies are holistic, and technical and commercial aspects are connected in unison.

Helping to make better health happen is one of my personal motivations. 

Knowing that our work directly contributes to patients gaining access to life-changing therapies, especially those with severely debilitating symptoms with no other therapeutic options, gives me a huge feeling of pride in what we are doing.

I have enjoyed many moments like this; however, I think nothing beats the feeling I had when overseeing the development of economic evidence and strategy for a particularly rare and severe pediatric condition.

It was rewarding to partner with our client in overcoming the inherent challenges these therapy areas bring, and successfully meeting the challenges of health technology assessment agencies and reimbursement bodies across the world.

The growing complexity within evidence requirements demands a fresh approach.

In the rapidly evolving value, evidence, and access space there is a growing stringency around evidence requirements and a focus on addressing uncertainty. I have seen that novel and flexible modeling and data analysis approaches are increasingly becoming a requirement for consideration in evidence generation activities.

For example, it’s no longer enough to rely on a “standard” list of parametric curves or analytic approaches, especially when dealing with challenging datasets.

Today, to meet the complex needs of multiple and diverse stakeholders, clients must show they have considered a much broader range of distributions, scenarios, assumptions, and data sources. There is a need for a fresh approach that demonstrates understanding of the challenges these stakeholders face and communicates how uncertainty has been managed transparently, and as far as possible.

Achieving success for our clients by connecting HEOR with strategic understanding.

Health economics outcomes research (HEOR) can be perceived as a very specialized and technical field—there is a requirement for technical rigor and academic depth of understanding to ensure that the evidence generated is done so in a robust and appropriate manner.

However, it is important that the focus on technical aspects is not at the expense of the clients’ commercial and strategic aims.

I combine HEOR expertise with strategic understanding to ensure that we provide our clients with technically sound outputs that are fully fit for purpose. The evidence, tools, and plan we create must align with the overall strategy and resonate with all the relevant audiences. It must be developed with the end goal in mind and to achieve the specific key success factors that we and our clients agree together.

The hēRo3 Revolution: accelerating and empowering HEOR analytics with cutting-edge digital solutions

One of the innovations that I am particularly keen on sharing with clients is our revolutionary hēRo3 modeling platform.

Within HEOR there has been a reliance on using Excel for modeling needs, some HEOR teams can’t perform the analytics fast enough to contribute at the decision-making table when they are called upon. Excel simply isn’t equipped to keep up with the innovation needs that companies now demand or can be achieved through recent advances in alternative technologies.

That’s where our hēRo3 platform comes in; it is a is a secure cloud platform for building, running, and sharing Markov cohort and partitioned survival models and is a game changer for how HEOR insights can and should be used in the decision-making process.

We enjoy the journey—a shared value among our global community of experts.

Across our global community of experts, we share cultural values, and the value of “enjoying the journey” is particularly meaningful for me.

Viewing our client projects and partnerships and engagements as a journey encourages agility and a multi-perspective approach—as more information and data become available and we gain the diversity of thinking within our team, we constantly consider the overall journey. We adapt our approach and plan where and when needed to ensure the course we take remains optimal to achieve our end goal.

We are always looking for people who will deliver first-class work.

If you’d like to find out more about career opportunities within our organization, please look through our current vacancies or get in touch with your CV.