Jason Harris Highlights National Health Council's Recommendations on Real-World Evidence

There still needs to be more education around what real-world evidence is, explained Jason Harris, associate director of policy and programs at National Health Council.

Transcript

What recommendations did the National Health Council come out with in its white paper on real-world evidence?

Recently, it’s been a real-world evidence year, if you will. We hosted a roundtable to solicit the patient perspective. We had close to 50 people in the room, about 15 experts from your more industry perspective and then about 30 patient organizations to just figure out what their concerns were, what their thoughts were, did they know about it. What we really learned from that is that overall, the concept is something that we need more education on, but once it’s explained and understood, it’s certainly something that patient organizations want to be involved in and we want to make sure that the ship doesn’t leave without insuring that perspective.

As you work with patients on real-world evidence, are you finding areas where their perceptions were not lined up with reality?

I think it’s a really good point. Overall, when we talk about the concept of what real-world evidence is and a patient hears that, they think for the most part it makes sense that it would be done because we are thinking of this high-tech era where we can use everything. It’s that understanding of well in healthcare, we are a little bit behind in terms of how we do things and so they were surprised that it wasn’t being done and that we weren’t quite there yet once they understood the concept.