HealthLumen Supplier Spotlight

Supplier Spotlight® highlights the unique skills and services offered by organizations who are part of our CONNECTED COMMUNITY™. Recently, we spoke with HealthLumen who are specialists in modeling non-communicable diseases and simulating the health and economic impacts of proposed interventions before real-world implementation. Check out the interview below and visit HealthLumen.

What is your company’s mission?

HealthLumen’s mission is to improve global health outcomes by creating data-driven insights for decision making. We are specialists in quantifying the burden of chronic diseases into the future. Our platform, based on powerful microsimulation technology, enables us to simulate the health and economic impact of proposed interventions before real-world implementation. We provide actionable insights, and generate evidence, to support organizations with making key decisions in the lifecycle of a product (including clinical trials) or service.

What products and services do you offer?

Using the validated methodology of our microsimulation-based modeling platform, we provide critical support in market planning, scenario analysis and healthcare policy solutions, all based on mapping the burden of disease.

Our “intervention modeling” estimates the health and economic impacts of a range of interventions, including new drugs for entire populations, or specific subgroups at a local, regional, or national level. By comparing different scenarios, decision makers can make informed choices before real world implementation.

The outputs of the analysis are delivered in multiple formats including reports, scientific manuscripts, and interactive dashboards which are designed to enable rapid and flexible dissemination of results to multiple stakeholders.

Over 20 chronic diseases are covered in our platform, including chronic kidney disease (CKD), liver disease, obesity, cardiovascular conditions, and many types of cancers.

What problems do you solve?

Our chronic disease modeling has two main applications to assist decision-making:

• Estimating future disease trends based on demographic change or predicted changes in risk factors.
• Quantifying the impact of interventions to help understand the effect of prevention, screening or treatment interventions on health and economic outcomes.

We combine our unique population model with data, literature, and policy analysis to help organizations to:

• Estimate future disease prevalence and burden
• Quantify the health and economic value of solutions or “interventions” designed to prevent or manage chronic health conditions
• Quantify the impact of industry and public policy changes
• Evaluate randomized trials into the future
• Generate evidence for policy change
• Make emerging technology investment decisions
• Evaluate the impact of new or altered interventions or therapeutic treatments
• Evaluate the market to determine the potential for therapeutic solutions, improving sales and revenue forecasting
• Analyze and respond to epidemiological and related economic problems

What are the most innovative tools and technologies that you offer?

Our innovative microsimulation models are based on computer-generated “virtual populations” that reproduce the characteristics and behavior of a large sample of individuals representing the whole population of interest.

There are many benefits to this approach, which include:

• Allowing the testing of the potential impacts of interventions, through “what if” scenarios and the related costs of implementation
• Time, cost, and ethical advantages of using simulation models vs real world experiments, which are not possible with population level interventions
• Enabling a wide set of comparisons to identify the most promising combinations of prevention screening and treatment approaches for different types of patients
• Going beyond the follow-up periods of typical clinical trials so that long-term outcomes can be compared 20, 30, 50 years into the future
• Going beyond narrow definitions of study outcomes to outcomes in real-world settings where patients are complex and remain at risk of developing a wide range of disease conditions i.e. accounting for comorbidities

What are your competitive advantages?

Our competitive advantage resides in two main areas; our team and our technology.

We have an expert multi-disciplinary team, comprising mathematicians, software engineers, epidemiologists, health economists, policy experts and data scientists. The team is uniquely placed to carry out complex statistical modeling of risk factors and diseases using large epidemiological and economic datasets to evaluate the health and economic impact of almost any intervention.

The innovative capabilities, outlined in the previous section, have a track record stretching back many years. Our modeling has been fully validated, extensively published in high impact journals, and endorsed by the OECD as the optimal approach for modeling chronic diseases and the impact of interventions.

Who are your clients?

Our client base spans both the private and public sector. In the private sector, our main client base is the pharmaceutical industry; examples of clients include AstraZeneca, Pfizer, and AbbVie.

In the public sector we work with major health charities, international development organizations, and leading medical associations. Examples of public sector clients include the World Health Organization (WHO), The European Association for the Study of the Liver (EASL), Cancer Research UK (CRUK), and The British Heart Foundation (BHF)

What new products and services are you developing in 2022/23?

Our recent focus has been on applying our modeling and simulation to assist with the critical decision on progressing from Phase 2 to Phase 3 of a clinical trial and help improve the chances of success. Microsimulation modeling can also provide insights about whether the drug is economically viable by determining if there is sufficient clinical evidence for the drug under development to achieve cost-effectiveness, as well as optimizing the actual design of the trial.

Specifically, we have undertaken modeling to answer questions such as:

• Will the drug reach a cost-effectiveness threshold and within what timeframe will it deliver a profit?
• What clinical endpoints are most important in terms of cost-effectiveness?
• In what populations, or sub-populations, is the drug most cost-effective?
• What is the minimum, ideal and maximum price point for which the drug would get reimbursed?
• How does the cost-effectiveness of the drug compare to alternatives on the market over a given time frame?

Where are your laboratories and/or offices located?

HealthLumen is headquartered in the UK, but we have undertaken modeling studies in over 70 countries, so our reach and capabilities extend worldwide.

To learn more please visit https://www.healthlumen.com/or contact us at  info@healthlumen.com