Boshen Jiao has earned the 2025 ISPOR Award for Excellence in Health Economics and Outcomes Research Methodology. The prize recognizes his April 2024 paper, “Evaluating Policies of Expanding Versus Restricting First-Line Treatment Choices: A Cost-Effectiveness Analysis Framework,” published in Value in Health, ISPOR’s flagship journal.
“Using data and tools from economics, decision science and statistics, I developed new approaches and evidence that help policymakers make more efficient and fair choices about which medical innovations to support,” says Jiao, assistant professor of pharmaceutical and health economics at the USC Mann School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences and a fellow at the USC Schaeffer Center for Health Policy & Economics.
To be presented during a ceremony at ISPOR Europe 2025 in Glasgow on Sunday, November 9, the award honors papers that advance the field of outcomes research and are expected to have a substantial impact on the field through widespread acceptance and application.
The paper—written with colleagues at the University of Washington School of Pharmacy’s Comparative Health Outcomes, Policy and Economics (CHOICE) Institute—proposes a new cost-effectiveness analysis framework that provides decision-makers with tools to assess alternative policies related to expanding or restricting first-line treatment options. The framework accounts for heterogeneous treatment effects, patient preferences, real-world treatment patterns and policy costs to give healthcare payers a more realistic view when deciding coverage.
Jiao’s research addresses comparative effectiveness and cost-effectiveness analysis, health outcomes research, and value-based pricing and insurance design. His work aims to support medical decision-making and guide health policies across various disease areas.
“My research helps guide smarter investments in healthcare, so patients benefit when they receive treatments that truly improve their lives,” he says.
Founded in 1995, ISPOR—the International Society of Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research—has more than 19,000 individual and chapter members from 110+ countries worldwide.
Jiao, who joined USC Mann in July 2024 from Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where he was a postdoctoral fellow, is the third USC faculty member to receive the ISPOR Award for Excellence in Health Economics and Outcomes Research Methodology in recent years. William Padula, associate professor of pharmaceutical health and economics, received the award in 2024 for his paper “Predicting Pressure Injury Risk in Hospitalised Patients Using Machine Learning with Electronic Health Records: a U.S. Multilevel Cohort Study,” and Darius Lakdawalla—Quintiles Chair in Pharmaceutical Development and Regulatory Innovation at USC Mann and chief scientific officer at the Schaeffer Center—received the award in 2021 for his paper “Health Technology Assessment with Risk Aversion in Health.”
Other Trojans honored at ISPOR Europe 2025 include Yawen Jiang, PhD ’16, now associate professor at Sun Yat-sen University in China, who won the Paper of the Year Award. Drishti Baid, a current PhD student at the Price School, received the Paper of the Year Award in Value in Health Regional Issues, with Lakdawalla as a coauthor.