Joe Couto, PharmD, MBA
Assistant Professor, Jefferson School of Population Health
Director, Fellowship Program
On Monday, June 27th JSPH hosted our annual Fellow’s Day, where we celebrated 17 years of training Fellows in health economics and outcomes research. The half-day program began with a keynote from one of our own, Joe Doyle, who completed the fellowship in 1998. Joe gave a detailed account of work he recently had published in Health Affairs along with another Jefferson fellowship graduate Feride Frech-Tamas and several other colleagues at Novartis and Thomson Reuters. Their article was entitled “A Value-Based Insurance Design Program At A Large Company Boosted Medication Adherence For Employees With Chronic Illnesses,” and examined the impact of value based insurance on asthma, cardiovascular, and diabetes medication use over a 3 year period.
We then heard from current Fellows Kellie Dudash and Sangtaeck Lim, who each presented an outcomes research project they completed during the first year of their fellowship. Next Joe Jackson, the program director for our Applied Health Economics and Outcomes Research master's degree, outlined plans for the new program that will be launching in September of this year. This new degree program has especially exciting implications for our fellowship program, as it will offer future Fellows the opportunity to earn a formal degree in the field in which they are training. We ended the morning on a bittersweet note as we graduated an exceptional class of second year Fellows: Eddie Lee, Lane Slabaugh, and Anita Mohandas. My fellowship overlapped with Eddie, Lane, and Anita and it was my distinct pleasure having worked with all three of them.
Fellows Day is first and foremost a celebration of the accomplishments of our current Fellows. However the entire morning served as yet another reminder to the faculty and staff of JSPH, our fellowship sponsors, invited guests, and former fellows in attendance of the rich history of our fellowship and its role in shaping the science of health economics and outcomes research.