Neuroscientist and Associate Director, Biogen

>> My name is Eric Hall II, and I work in the pharmaceutical biotechnology industry. I lead up a team that is responsible for generating clinical and economic evidence to support access and reimbursement for our products in the marketplace. So, I think at the end of the day, our responsibility is to essentially generate and establish the value proposition for a given therapy. And so, that's leveraging both quantitative and qualitative data and information that tells the story, if you will. Most people are familiar with RCTs and randomized clinical trials to demonstrate the safety and efficacy of a product, but it really goes far beyond that in terms of delivering value to stakeholders out in the marketplace. So, one of the things that we're focused on right now is continuing to demonstrate the overall healthcare resource utilization and costs within a given condition, called Spinal Muscular Atrophy. So that's SMA. It's a condition in which is a high unmet medical need. There haven't been therapies in the marketplace previously, and so the ownness is on us to demonstrate, okay, what are the total direct medical costs for this condition, and also continuing to build the overall humanistic side of the value equation in capturing patient outcomes, the impact on caregiver burden, the patients themselves, and also capturing quality of life and, you know, work productivity and school absenteeism, and these additional factors that often go unnoticed. And along with the out-of-pocket costs in which patients and their families have to spend with respect to their condition, that often aren't captured because insurance is not necessarily covering those, and that can be substantial in this condition, with respect to modifications to their homes, having to purchase new vehicles, as well as durable medical equipment for the patients.