Our Insights from ISPOR 2025, Montreal

Costello Medical were delighted to have a team of 10 colleagues attend ISPOR 2025 in Montreal, Canada, where the theme was: Collaborating to Improve Healthcare Decision Making for All: Expanding HEOR Horizons. We really enjoyed our (busy!) time at the conference, meeting with other attendees, attending sessions, and exploring the city outside of the conference centre!

This year’s agenda was unsurprisingly dominated by a few key topics, including drug price controls relating to the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and Prescription Drug Affordability Boards (PDABs), and the use of artificial intelligence (AI) within the health economic and outcomes research (HEOR) field. Additionally, the location of the conference in Canada led to a spotlight on the Canadian setting, with sessions incorporating perspectives of key stakeholders from organisations such as Canada’s Drug Agency (CDA-AMC), and L’Institut national d’excellence en santé et services sociaux (INESSS).

For the IRA, whilst this certainly isn’t a new topic for ISPOR, this year’s conference presented the latest thinking on its impact, now that even more time has passed since its introduction in 2022. This included our own issue panel moderated by Kate Hanman, our US Head of Rare Diseases, where a diverse group of experts contemplated the impact of the IRA on investment and innovation in the rare diseases space, with input from manufacturer, policy, and investor perspectives (the latter of which were noted as often being absent from forums such as ISPOR, but key to a balanced debate). Discussions on the US healthcare industry and policy were also held in the context of the executive order from the Trump administration relating to reducing prescription drug pricing in the US that was announced the day before the conference, leading to many discussions on topics such as (the limitations of) reference pricing, drug imports vs in-country manufacturing, as well as a general feeling of uncertainty as to what the next few months and years may hold in terms of research and development, innovation, access, and pricing.

There was also a large focus on the application of AI in HEOR, with one of our delegates attending an insightful short course on the topic, and presenting a poster on optimising prompt engineering for economic systematic literature review (SLR) extractions. This work is part of a wider research stream at the company as we look to streamline the integration of genAI into our literature review workstreams where we leverage our in-house developed application, SIFT. Once again, we saw progression toward not only speculating about the use of AI, but discussion of the best use cases, key considerations, and current limitations.

There was, of course, plenty more on the conference agenda besides the IRA, and AI, with breakout sessions, podium presentations and posters providing updates on cutting-edge methods in HEOR and the latest insights into market access policy for pharmaceuticals and MedTech.

We were pleased to contribute one issue panel and 6 research posters of our own to the conference (these can be found on our Articles & Publications page alongside our other published research), which led to some really insightful discussions with other attendees.