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February 24, 2010
Growth of Health Economics and Scheduling iHEA
The number of trained health economists has grown rapidly, more than doubling during the last twenty years. This growth has been a boon to our field, but has also created strains in the existing organizational structures. There are now more academic positions and a larger public policy presence, but also an ever-increasing number of new graduates and new research papers in need of peer review and dissemination. The increasing number of health economists wishing to make a presentation has put significant pressure on the iHEA program. For most delegates attending the congress, making an oral presentation of their research is very important to them, and sometimes a precondition of funding.
Growth in the number of research institutes and professorships in health economics has also increased the number of universities/cities able to make a credible case for why they should be chosen to host a World Congress. iHEA has already received bids from 6 groups across the globe for conferences after 2013 in Sydney. Accommodating all of them while having only one congress every other year could extend the current queue for new proposals out to 2025.
One way to accommodate growth would be to simply make each World Congress bigger. Another suggestion is to have iHEA move toward annual Congresses (probably with a fixed geographic rotation to avoid scheduling conflicts with ASHEcon, ECHE and other affiliates). Previously the board was reluctant to do so because it was not clear that there was a sufficient supply of timely research or demand for conference attendance. Recent growth indicates that global demand and supply are significantly greater than they were in 1996. While it is likely that an annual World Congress would have slightly smaller attendance, and that fewer researchers would attend every single Congress, the total participation would increase – and some members feel that while a World Congress should be large and inclusive, a meeting with somewhat fewer than 2,000 delegates might be better than one that was somewhat larger.
The iHEA board decided at its July 2009 meeting in Beijing to seek out the opinions of the membership to help guide us I making strategic decisions regarding future meetings, even though it will take several years to make any significant changes. To that end, we will be sending out a survey and “request for comments” to all members. I hope that you will be willing to share your thoughts with us to help make iHEA and other health economics organizations better able to meet the exciting challenges of future growth.
You can get more background from the document Growth and Scale of Health Economics Organizations
