Few aspects of society are being transformed by technology more than health and medical care, with health systems challenged to finance and deliver affordable access to a burgeoning array of technologies enabling longer, healthier lives. Three speakers will address different and complementary aspects of how several Asian health systems create, evaluate, and regulate transformative technologies. Dr. Masuda’s research probes policies governing domestic and cross-border control and sharing of genetic information for medical innovation. Dr. Ahn will discuss health technology assessment (HTA) for pricing and reimbursement decisions in South Korea, where there is a young yet established HTA program, compared to Japan, where a 3-year HTA pilot program has just concluded, and China, where HTA efforts are underway but have not been formally implemented. Finally, Dr. Ho will discuss the emergence of digital medicine enabling N-of-1 regimen design for patients. Truly individualizing patient treatment requires addressing a series of challenges, from dynamic patient response to treatment regimens, to accounting for drug synergies in combination therapies which can be dose-dependent, time-dependent, and patient-specific, such as in oncology. Dr. Ho will summarize several clinical studies aiming to increase accessibility to personalized, precision medicine while reducing healthcare costs.

Sachiko Masuda is a Visiting Scholar at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (Shorenstein APARC) for the 2021-22 academic year and an Associate Professor at the University of Tokyo, Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology.  Masuda is dedicated to the study of legal systems, regulations, infrastructure and industrial structures necessary for advances in technology and a safer society, especially in the pharmaceutical and medical fields. At Shorenstein APARC, she is conducting a comparative Japan-U.S. study on "Human Genetic Information for Medical Innovation: Examining Policy Issues Related to Ensuring Domestic and Transnational Sharing and Management" supported by the ABE Fellowship Program of the Social Science Research Council. Masuda received a Ph.D. (specializing in intellectual property law) in 2006 and a B.S. in Pharmaceutical Sciences in 1997 from the University of Tokyo.

Dr. Jeonghoon Ahn is a full professor at the Ewha Womans University (Seoul, Korea) and an adjunct fellow at the National Evidence-based healthcare Collaborating Agency (NECA), Seoul, Korea. He is an expert on health technology assessment (HTA) and health economics. He worked 7 years in NECA and served in various decision making and advisory committees of public agencies such as the Health Insurance Review and Assessment Services (HIRA) and the Korean Centers for Disease Control (KCDC). Professor Ahn has graduated the Seoul National University Department of International Economics for undergraduate and master program. He also received a PhD in Economics from the University of Southern California (USC) and was an assistant professor of pharmaceutical economics and Policy at the USC. Dr. Ahn has served on many international professional organizations such as ISPOR, HTAi, INAHTA, and HTAsiaLink. He is the Chair of the ISPOR Asia Consortium (2020-2022) and was a president of ISPOR Korea Chapter (2012-2014). Dr. Ahn was elected as a board director of the Health Technology Assessment International (HTAi) (2014-2016) and a board director for the International Network of Agencies for Health Technology Assessment (INAHTA) for three times (2012-2016). He also contributed to form a regional Health Technology Assessment agency network, the HTAsiaLink (www.htasialink.org), along with other experts in the region.

Professor Dean Ho is currently Provost’s Chair Professor, Director of The N.1 Institute for Health (N.1), Director of The Institute for Digital Medicine (WisDM) and Head of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the National University of Singapore. Prof. Ho and collaborators successfully developed and validated CURATE.AI, a powerful digital medicine platform that has optimized human treatment for broad indications ranging from oncology to infectious diseases. He co-led the first inhuman clinical trials that have resulted in completely halted disease progression and durable patient responses that substantially outperformed standard of care approaches. Prof. Ho is a Fellow of the US National Academy of Inventors (NAI), the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), and the Royal Society of Chemistry. He was also recently named to the HIMSS Future50 Class of 2021 for his internationally-recognised leadership in digital health. His discoveries have been featured on CNN, The Economist, National Geographic, Forbes, Washington Post, NPR and other international news outlets. Prof. Ho is also a Subgroup Lead in the World Health Organization (WHO)-ITU AI for Health Working Group for Regulatory Considerations. Prof. Ho is a recipient of the Tech Heroes from Crisis Pathfinder Award from the Singapore Computer Society, NSF CAREER Award, Wallace H. Coulter Foundation Translational Research Award, and V Foundation for Cancer Research Scholar Award, among others. He has also served as the President of the Board of Directors of the Society for Laboratory Automation and Screening (SLAS), a 26,000+ member global drug development organization.

This event is part of the 2022 Winter webinar series, New Frontiers: Technology, Politics, and Society in the Asia-Pacific, sponsored by the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center.

Join us  Tuesday, December 7th from 12 PM - 1 PM PST for “Media Choices, Niche Behavior, and Biases in Online Information” featuring Sandra González-Bailón, Associate Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at University of Pennsylvania. This seminar series is organized by the Cyber Policy Center’s Program on Democracy and the Internet and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation’s Cyber Initiative.  

The quality of our democracies relies on the quality of the information that citizens consume but we still know very little about how citizens engage with the news “in the wild”. In this talk, I will discuss two papers that examine that question in different settings. The first paper analyzes the media choices of a representative panel of the U.S. population (N ~ 55,000) as they consume TV, web, and YouTube content over a period of 44 months. Less than 10% of the panelists (N ~ 5,300) view and browse news on the three platforms. This small group of news hyper-consumers is formed predominantly by older male users with higher education. We find no evidence of substitution effects in the time these users spend consuming news on each of the three platforms, but consuming news across the media landscape is a choice that only a small and unrepresentative slice of the population makes. These results help us characterize the digital equivalent of the ‘opinion leaders’ first proposed to understand the effects of mass media. The hyper-consumers we identify in our analyses create the elite of opinion leaders that have a disproportionate influence in how news content is selected, circulated, and (ultimately) algorithmically amplified. That this small group is far from representing the population at large is one of the ways in which online information may perpetuate important biases in the salience of some topics over others. The second paper analyzes news sharing in social media during one of the largest protest mobilizations in U.S. history to examine ideological asymmetries in the posting of news content. We extract the list of URLs shared during the mobilization period and we characterize those web sites in terms of their audience reach and the ideological composition of that audience. We also analyze the reliability of the sites in terms of the credibility and transparency of the information they publish. We show that there is no evidence of unreliable sources having any prominent visibility during the protest period, but we do identify asymmetries in the ideological slant of the sources shared, with a clear bias towards right-leaning domains. Our results suggest that online networks are contested spaces where the activism of progressive movements coexists with the narratives of mainstream media, which gain visibility under the same stream of information but whose reporting is not necessarily aligned with the activists’ goals.

About the speaker:

Sandra González-Bailón is an Associate Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication, and affiliated faculty at the Warren Center for Network and Data Sciences. Her research lies at the intersection of network science, computational tools, and political communication. She is the author of Decoding the Social World (MIT Press, 2017) and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Networked Communication (OUP, 2020). More information on her research can be found at https://sandragonzalezbailon.net/
 
Her articles have appeared in journals like PNAS, Nature, Science, Political Communication, The Journal of Communication, and Social Networks, among others. She is the author of the book Decoding the Social World (MIT Press, 2017) and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Networked Communication (OUP, 2020). She serves as Associate Editor for the journals Social Networks, EPJ Data Science, and The International Journal of Press/Politics, and she is a member of the Board of Reviewing Editors for Science. She leads the research group DiMeNet (/daɪmnet/) — acronym for Digital Media, Networks, and Political Communication.

 

Asia Health Policy Program (AHPP) 2021-22 Colloquium series "Aligning Incentives for Better Health and More Resilient Health Systems in Asia”

How can policymakers quantify the net value of medical spending? For what medical conditions has the “bang for the buck” been greatest, and for what conditions has spending outstripped gains in health improvement? Join this virtual workshop to learn about cutting-edge methods that can be applied to health system data to understand the net value of changes in medical spending over time, and how policymakers can track the effectiveness of policies to increase productivity of medical spending. In addition to several Asian policymakers already involved, virtual workshop participants will have the opportunity to pose questions to the expert speakers about applying these methods to their own health system settings, including advice about data, outcomes, and relevance for specific policy questions.

David Cutler is the Otto Eckstein Professor of Applied Economics in the Department of Economics, Harvard University, with secondary appointments at the Kennedy School of Government and the School of Public Health. He was associate dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences for Social Sciences from 2003-2008. Professor Cutler served on the Council of Economic Advisers and the National Economic Council during the Clinton Administration and has advised several presidential campaigns, including as Senior Health Care Advisor for the Obama Presidential Campaign. He is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a member of the Institute of Medicine, and he has held positions with the National Institutes of Health and the National Academy of Sciences

Abe Dunn is the Assistant Chief Economist at the Bureau of Economic Analysis.  His work has focused on the production and development of a new satellite account for health care and on evaluating and using alternative data sources for measurement purposes.  The Health Care Satellite Account uses billions of medical care claims from public and private sources to improve measurement for the U.S. health care sector, which allows researchers to analyze spending trends by medical condition.  Dr. Dunn has published research on a range of topics with a particular focus on health economic issues and measurement.  Most recently, his research has focused on measuring both the cost and the quality of medical care treatments. He received his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin with a primary focus in the areas of health economics and industrial organization.

Professor Marcia Weaver earned a PhD in economics at the University of Chicago. She specializes in cost-effectiveness analysis and has published 87 peer-reviewed articles. At the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), she leads the research team on cost-effectiveness analyses of interventions to reduce the burden of disease. Prior to joining IHME she served as principal investigator of the Integrated Infectious Disease Capacity Building Evaluation in partnership with the Infectious Diseases Institute in Uganda. In the United States, she published on cost-effectiveness of interventions for people with HIV, chronic mental illness and substance abuse, and on a joint campaign to promote influenza and pneumococcal vaccines. Professor Weaver also has extensive experience with evaluating the effects of clinical training programs in Botswana, Indonesia, Namibia, South Africa, Thailand, and the Caribbean region, and served as a long-term advisor on health system reform to ministries of health in Niger and Central African Republic.