Program Snapshot

The Common Fund’s Health Economics program supported research to identify factors influencing adoption of new innovations in treatments, diagnosis, and preventive strategies; so that past and future investments by NIH may have greater public health impact. To that end the program focused on identifying factors that influence the adoption of high-value health technologies and personalized medicine approaches.

Examples of program research accomplishments include:

  • Expanded research community in health economics that is now being utilized at multiple NIH institutes to address issues in which economic analysis of factors can influence health and the adoption of NIH-supported innovations.
  • Identified factors that influence both optimal adoption of high-value health technologies and phasing out low value technologies.
  • Expanded understanding of preferences from physicians, payers, and patients that impact adoption of personalized medicine approaches. Also assessed the value of these approaches using test cases such as gene testing to inform breast cancer treatment or prescription drug effectiveness.
  • Developed the State Health Practices Database for Research (SHPDR), a resource containing data on state-level statues that can be used with common statistical analysis packages to inform health economics research.

This page last reviewed on January 12, 2022