Turning Data into Direction: 10 Trends Defining HEOR’s Role in 2027
Healthcare is transforming fast, driven by new technology, financial pressure and higher expectations for evidence-based decisions. For Health Economics and Outcomes Research (HEOR) leaders, this creates both opportunity and complexity: data is growing, value definitions are shifting and the path from innovation to real-world impact is increasingly interconnected.
Based on ISPOR’s 2026–2027 report, these 10 trends show not only what is changing in healthcare, but how expectations for evidence generation, value measurement and real-world performance are evolving. From artificial intelligence (AI) and real-world evidence (RWE) to value-based care and patient centricity, the common challenge is turning expanding data into measurable clinical, operational and financial impact.
Our perspective focuses on how HEOR leaders can align data, methods and real-world application to enable consistent, scalable, evidence-driven decisions. In today’s environment, the ability to generate, validate and operationalize evidence is central to demonstrating value, supporting access and improving total cost-of-care performance.
1. Artificial Intelligence
Transforming HEOR through responsible use of AI
Where we’re going
AI is the top trend in ISPOR’s 2026–2027 report, reflecting rapid adoption across healthcare and HEOR. AI improves efficiency by speeding literature reviews, structuring complex datasets and enabling advanced predictive modeling with machine learning and large language models (LLMs). Emerging approaches such as agentic AI may further boost productivity by automating tasks and supporting decision-making.
As AI scales, so do risks — privacy, bias and inaccuracy — making governance, transparency and human oversight essential. Groups such as ISPOR are developing frameworks for responsible AI in healthcare research. To realize impact, organizations need trusted data foundations and disciplined governance that translate AI insights into real-world clinical and economic outcomes.
How Premier can help you get there
Fast insights matter, but in healthcare and HEOR they must be explainable, reproducible and grounded in real-world context. That means building models on high-quality data and supporting them with governance that stands up to regulatory and clinical scrutiny.
Premier anchors AI in research-ready real-world data (RWD) and a disciplined evidence-generation approach. The Premier Healthcare Database (PHD) combines longitudinal, all-payer data across care settings to provide a complete, scalable view of patient journeys, treatment patterns and outcomes.
Premier Applied Sciences (PAS) extends this foundation with natural language processing (NLP) that can scan millions of records per hour and surface clinically relevant insights from unstructured notes. This helps organizations identify patient cohorts, detect disease earlier and extract meaningful variables with greater speed, precision and consistency.
Paired with AI-enabled analytics, this approach supports faster study design, patient identification, evidence generation and predictive modeling without sacrificing rigor. It helps organizations scale beyond isolated use cases to produce decision-ready, credible insights for clinical, regulatory and market access needs.
2. Real-World Evidence
Enhancing data availability, quality and transparency
Where we’re going
RWE ranks as the No. 2 trend in ISPOR’s 2026-2027 report, reflecting its growing role in regulatory decision-making. Use of RWE is expanding rapidly, with agencies including the European Medicines Agency and U.S. Food and Drug Administration increasingly relying on it to assess drug safety, utilization and effectiveness. Advances such as the RCT-Duplicate project demonstrate that RWD can successfully emulate traditional clinical trials. However, challenges remain around fragmented data sources, reinforcing the need for greater data availability, standardization and integration. As a result, ISPOR and global health authorities are prioritizing transparency frameworks, interoperability standards and more consistent methodologies to ensure RWE is reliable, reproducible and trusted.
How Premier can help you get there
RWE has become foundational to how therapies and healthcare technologies are evaluated, but its value ultimately depends on the quality, integration and usability of the underlying data. The PHD — one of the most comprehensive electronic healthcare data repositories — provides a foundation for generating robust RWE at scale. By integrating clinical, financial and utilization data from more than 1,400 hospitals and applying advanced analytics and AI-driven processing, Premier helps support more consistent, timely and decision-ready evidence generation.
This supports regulatory alignment, accelerates research and helps ensure that RWE is credible and usable across clinical, regulatory, reimbursement and commercial contexts.
At the same time, fragmented data sources, inconsistent definitions and limited interoperability continue to create barriers to generating reproducible, decision-ready evidence. Addressing these challenges requires not just more data, but a more connected, transparent and analytically ready foundation.
When combined with advanced analytics, this foundation helps organizations identify patterns, assess outcomes and generate insights that are more representative of real-world practice and patient populations. This results in RWE that is more comprehensive and reproducable, helping organizations support regulatory requirements, strengthen research and make more informed clinical and business decisions.
3. Value-Based Care
Aligning health systems’ incentives to value
Where we’re going
Value-based care (VBC) debuts as the No. 3 trend in ISPOR’s 2026–2027 report, a testament to the momentum it continues to gain as health systems work to align payment with patient outcomes, with the dual aim of improving care quality and controlling costs. Ongoing financial pressures, workforce shortages and increasing demand for care are accelerating its adoption, supported by policy initiatives from organizations like the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
Delivering on this promise requires translating value into consistent, real-world clinical and operational decisions. For life sciences and medtech organizations, this redefines expectations: demonstrating value now extends beyond clinical efficacy to include measurable impact on utilization, variation and total cost of care.
Health economics and outcomes research plays a critical role in meeting this standard, providing the data, methodologies and RWE needed to quantify value in ways that resonate with providers, payers and regulators. As VBC evolves, there is increasing emphasis on incorporating real-world implementation factors and standardizing how value is defined and assessed across healthcare systems.
How Premier can help you get there
Value-based care is being operationalized across the healthcare system, where clinical, financial and outcomes decisions increasingly intersect. As organizations move from fee-for-service to value-based models, the challenge is not just defining value but consistently delivering it. For life sciences and medtech organizations, this means generating and validating evidence that reflects how care is delivered and ensuring that evidence can support decision-making at the point of care, as well as at the system level.
Premier brings a provider-informed lens to HEOR, helping organizations generate and validate RWE that aligns with clinical and operational realities. By connecting data, analytics and clinical workflows, Premier enables the ability to make more precise measurement of value across populations and care settings. This approach supports a deeper understanding of variation in care, use patterns and cost drivers, enabling more accurate assessments of clinical and economic impact.
By embedding these insights into real-world workflows, organizations can better align evidence with practice, supporting more effective engagement with health systems and alignment with value-based performance priorities. This helps translate HEOR insights into real-world applications that can demonstrate measurable impact, supporting more consistent performance, stronger outcomes and sustained progress toward value-based care.
4. Drug Value and Cost of Care
Improving patient access and affordability
Where we’re going
Rising drug costs continue to draw scrutiny across the healthcare ecosystem, but price alone is an incomplete measure of impact. The focus is increasingly shifting toward drug value and how therapies influence clinical outcomes, downstream utilization and total cost of care. This shift is accelerating the adoption of value-based frameworks that connect therapies to real-world performance across patient populations and care settings.
At the same time, health systems, payers and regulators are looking for more comprehensive evidence to understand how therapies perform beyond controlled trial environments. Given these dynamics, HEOR and RWE play a critical role in quantifying value, which helps link treatment decisions to outcomes, utilization and broader cost-of-care dynamics.
How Premier can help you get there
For life sciences organizations, demonstrating value requires a more comprehensive view of how therapies perform in real-world settings, connecting pricing, utilization, outcomes and supply chain dynamics. Traditional approaches that isolate pricing from real-world performance are no longer sufficient, as reimbursement, access and utilization are increasingly tied to measurable clinical and financial impact.
Premier helps address this challenge by connecting pricing, utilization and supply chain data to provide greater visibility into true costs and highlight a drug’s value in practice. By integrating purchasing data, usage patterns and clinical outcomes, organizations can better understand how therapies influence variation in care, downstream resource use and overall cost of care. Advanced analytics and RWE enable more precise evaluation of clinical and economic impact, supporting decisions the can help improve access, reduce variability and strengthen alignment with value-based care objectives. This approach strengthens the role of HEOR by grounding value demonstration in real-world performance, helping life sciences organizations more effectively engage with health systems, support access and contribute to improving cost of care.
5. Innovative Therapies
Fostering novel technologies to improve health
Where we’re going
Breakthrough therapies and medical devices remain a key trend, highlighting ongoing tension between the need to advance medical innovation and increasing financial and policy pressures. There is growing concern about misalignment between R&D investment, disease burden and unmet patient needs, with uncertainty around which policies most effectively drive innovation. While biopharma pipelines (particularly in rare diseases) and emerging medical technologies continue to advance, heightened evidence requirements from payers and health technology assessment bodies are making market access more complex. At the same time, shifting policies, pricing pressures and global changes — including China’s rise within clinical development — are reshaping where and how innovation occurs. In this evolving landscape, HEOR plays a critical role in generating the evidence needed to support access, value assessment and policy decisions across therapeutic and device-driven innovations.
How Premier can help you get there
The rise of innovative therapies and medical device technologies, including cell and gene therapies, digital health solutions and other advanced interventional devices, is redefining what’s possible. Yet the path from breakthrough innovation to consistent, real-world impact remains complex. High upfront costs, evolving evidence requirements and uncertainty around long-term outcomes are challenging traditional evaluation models.
Premier helps address this challenge by applying implementation science to bridge the gap between research, innovation and real-world practice across both therapies and medical devices. By connecting clinical evidence with RWD and provider workflows, organizations can better understand how therapies and devices perform outside controlled environments and how they can be effectively integrated into care delivery. This approach supports more adaptive, evidence-driven evaluation, enabling continuous learning as new data emerges, helping refine treatment pathways, device utilization and care delivery models over time. Through this lens, HEOR moves beyond just being a tool for initial value assessment to become an ongoing mechanism that supports outcome validation, access decisions and the sustainable adoption of innovative therapies and medical device technologies.
6. Patient Centricity
Dialing up the volume on the “patient voice”
Where we’re going
Patient centricity has risen in importance, reflecting a broader shift toward embedding patient perspectives, experiences and priorities into healthcare decision-making. Regulators such as the European Medicines Agency and U.S. Food and Drug Administration are advancing guidance to formalize how patient experience data is collected and used across the product lifecycle. Digital health tools, including wearables, are accelerating this trend by enabling more continuous, real-world patient input and expanding access to research participation. The shift marks an evolution from studying patients to partnering with them, which helps incorporate the patient voice directly into evidence generation, value assessment and care decisions. In this context, HEOR plays a growing role in quantifying patient experience and translating it into measurable clinical, financial and quality-of-life outcomes that inform care and coverage decisions.
How Premier can help you get there
Patient experience, preferences and access are increasingly shaping how value is defined and measured. For HEOR teams, this requires incorporating patient-generated data into evidence frameworks to capture the patient voice and structure it alongside clinical and economic data to inform decisions that reflect real-world barriers and outcomes.
Premier helps address this challenge by connecting patient access, utilization and outcomes data to provide a more complete view of the patient journey. By integrating insights across care settings, organizations can better understand how factors such as access barriers, site-of-care decisions and treatment pathways influence both experience and outcomes. This approach enables more precise identification of gaps in care, supports more equitable access strategies and strengthens the integration of patient-centered measures into value and outcomes frameworks. This extends HEOR beyond traditional clinical endpoints, enabling decisions that better align outcomes with real-world patient needs.
7. Relevance of HEOR
Demonstrating the field vital role in health
Where we’re going
The growing relevance of HEOR reflects the increasing complexity of healthcare decision-making in a data-rich, resource-constrained environment where stakeholders are under growing pressure to demonstrate measurable value. As health systems face mounting pressures — from rising costs and workforce shortages to aging populations and global disruptions — HEOR provides critical insights to guide more informed, evidence-based decisions. It now plays a central role across healthcare, helping payers, providers, regulators and life sciences companies evaluate clinical value, financial impact and real-world performance. By translating complex data into actionable evidence, HEOR supports more informed policy, reimbursement and treatment decisions at both the patient and system level. As a result, HEOR is evolving from supporting analytical function to essential infrastructure that can help enable improved healthcare performance, demonstrated value and sustainability.
How Premier can help you get there
HEOR is no longer a downstream function to validate decisions after the fact. It has evolved to become a strategic capability that shapes how value is defined, measured and acted upon across the healthcare ecosystem.
As expectations rise, the challenge is not just generating credible evidence but ensuring that it is timely, relevant and operational across clinical, financial and policy decision-making. This requires access to comprehensive RWD that reflects how care is delivered across diverse populations and settings, as well as the ability to translate that data into decision-ready insights.
Premier helps support this shift by providing a robust RWD foundation that connects evidence generation with real-world application. The PHD offers one of the most comprehensive, longitudinal views of patient care, spanning clinical, financial and utilization data across care settings. The breadth and depth of data support rigorous analyses of treatment patterns, outcomes, utilization and cost across a wide range of HEOR and market access use cases.
By grounding HEOR in high-quality, research-ready data and connecting it to decision contexts, organizations are better positioned to move from insight generation to applied intelligence. This helps ensure evidence informs not only what is known but how decisions are made and value is demonstrated in practice.
8. Health Technology Assessment
Optimizing cross-country collaboration
Where we’re going
Health technology assessment (HTA) is re-emerging as a critical trend, as global health systems face growing pressure to evaluate innovative therapies with limited evidence and uncertain long-term outcomes. These challenges are particularly acute in resource-constrained settings, increasing the need for collaboration across countries and organizations. Efforts such as the European Union’s new HTA regulation are driving more standardized, cross-border approaches to evaluation and decision-making. Collaboration is also expanding to areas such as AI integration and managed entry agreements, which allow real-world performance and value to be assessed over time. Together, these developments are increasing demand for more representative, long-term evidence that can support consistent value assessment across populations, geographies and care settings. This shift strengthens the importance of RWD and RWE to become increasingly important complements to randomized clinical trials. This ultimately elevates organizations’ understanding of sustained outcomes, usage patterns and real-world performance.
How Premier can help you get there
HTA is gaining influence as organizations seek more structured, transparent approaches to evaluating therapies, technologies and interventions. As HTA expands across regions and stakeholders, the challenge is not just applying consistent methodologies but ensuring that the underlying data is robust, comparable and reflective of real-world practice over time. Without that foundation, efforts to standardize evaluation and support reimbursement and access decisions risk being limited by fragmented datasets, inconsistent methodologies and limited persistent visibility.
Premier helps strengthen HTA by integrating high-quality RWD from the PHD with traditional evidence sources to support more representative and comprehensive evaluation. The PHD connects clinical, financial and utilization data across diverse care settings, enabling organizations to generate evidence that reflects how therapies and technologies perform in practice across large patient populations over longer time frames than randomized clinical trials alone. This approach supports more precise value quantification, consistent assessments across populations and geographies, and stronger reimbursement and market access decisions. When HTA is grounded in high-quality RWD and RWE, organizations are better positioned to scale transparency, data-driven evaluation and enable more confident decision-making across healthcare systems.
9. Value Measurement
Expanding the definition of value to include whole health
Where we’re going
Value measurement is re-emerging as a key focus, as health systems seek a broader, more comprehensive definition of value beyond traditional clinical outcomes. There is growing emphasis on a “whole health” approach that includes social, financial and environmental factors that influence overall well-being. Leading organizations and countries are beginning to incorporate these broader metrics into decision-making, expanding how health interventions are evaluated and prioritized. This shift requires new methodologies and better use of existing tools to capture long-term and multi-dimensional value. As a result, HEOR is evolving to help quantify, validate and operationalize this more holistic view of health and value.
How Premier can help you get there
The definition of value is broadening, from isolated clinical outcomes to a more comprehensive view of whole health that includes quality of life, long-term impact and patient-reported outcomes. For HEOR teams, this shift introduces new complexity, requiring expanded data inputs and more sophisticated methodologies to capture value across clinical, economic and experiential dimensions. The challenge is not just redefining value but making it measurable and actionable in real-world decision-making — where consistency, comparability and scalability remain essential.
Premier helps address this challenge by enabling more structured, data-driven approaches to value analysis that integrate clinical, financial, operational and patient-centered perspectives. By bringing together multidisciplinary stakeholders and applying standardized evaluation frameworks, organizations can more consistently assess the full impact of therapies.
This approach supports broader, more representative value measurement while maintaining the rigor needed for decision-making. Through this lens, HEOR evolves from measuring discrete outcomes to guiding more holistic, system-level decisions that better align care delivery, resource allocation and long-term value.
10. Digital Health
Empowering patients with digital therapeutics and wearables
Where we’re going
Digital health rounds out the trends list, driven by the growing impact of digital therapeutics, wearables and AI in generating RWD and improving patient engagement. Innovations such as digital twins and AI-powered tools are expanding research capabilities and enabling more personalized, data-driven care. At the same time, approved digital therapeutics and mobile health apps are empowering patients to take a more active role in managing their health. These technologies are especially impactful in resource-constrained settings, where they can expand access and reduce costs through remote monitoring and telehealth. As adoption grows, the need for standardized frameworks to ensure data quality, interoperability, reliability and effective integration into evidence-generation models will become increasingly important.
How Premier can help you get there
Digital health, including therapeutics, remote monitoring and wearable technologies, is shifting from innovation to expectation. It’s a fundamental change in how data is generated and used in healthcare.
For HEOR leaders, this creates both opportunity and complexity. These tools produce continuous streams of real-world, patient-generated data that can enhance understanding of outcomes, engagement and real-world treatment performance. At the same time, variability in data quality, lack of standardization and uncertainty around long-term impact make it difficult to determine which signals are meaningful and how they should be operationalize within evidence frameworks.
Premier helps address this challenge by enabling organizations to integrate digital health data into structured, evidence-based evaluation and RWE models. By connecting patient-generated data with clinical, financial and utilization datasets, organizations can place digital signals in appropriate context, improving reliability, comparability and usability.
This approach supports more consistent evaluation of digital interventions using the same rigor applied to traditional therapies and medical technologies, helping ensure that new data streams translate into credible, decision-ready evidence. This positions digital health as a meaningful contributor to RWE generation and value assessment, not just as a source of innovation.
Conclusion
These trends signal a clear shift in the role of HEOR, from a function that supports decisions to one that increasingly shapes how value is defined, demonstrated and operationalized. As healthcare organizations navigate increasing complexity, the ability to generate credible evidence is no longer enough; that evidence must also be integrated, validated and applied to inform real-world clinical, financial, reimbursement and policy decisions.
The common thread across each of these trends is the need for connection: between data sources, between stakeholders and between insight and execution. Organizations that can bridge these gaps will be better positioned to quantify value, improve outcomes and respond to evolving expectations across the healthcare ecosystem.
As these trends continue to evolve, the focus will remain on transforming expanding sources of data and innovation into decision-ready intelligence that supports more consistent, scalable and sustainable performance.
See how Premier solutions can help you operationalize these trends.
The information described herein is intended to support evidence generation and internal decision‑making. It does not constitute regulatory advice, clinical recommendations, or guarantees of regulatory or reimbursement outcomes. Results depend on study design, data inputs, and independent review.