William V. Padula has earned the 2024 ISPOR Award for Excellence in Health Economics and Outcomes Research Methodology. The prize recognizes his use of machine learning to develop an algorithm for better predicting the risk of hospital-acquired pressure injuries—otherwise known as bedsores.
Nearly 60,000 deaths from bedsores occur every year in the U.S. alone, and the condition is the second most common reason for medical malpractice lawsuits nationwide.
“More people die from pressure injuries acquired in the hospital than from car accidents,” notes Padula, assistant professor of pharmaceutical and health economics at the USC Mann School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, and a fellow at the USC Schaeffer Center for Health Policy & Economics. “By my calculation, we could probably prevent most injuries with a $10 billion to $15 billion investment in a smart-hospital infrastructure using data science to eliminate $30 billion in waste while saving many lives.”
Padula detailed his algorithm, which increases the accuracy of prediction to more than 74%—a more than 20% increase over existing methods—in research published in BMJ Open. Peter J. Pronovost (University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center), David Armstrong (USC) and Suchi Saria (Johns Hopkins University) co-authored the study.
The award, to be presented in November at ISPOR Europe 2024 in Barcelona, is not the first time that the organization has lauded Padula’s innovations in this area. He received the 2019 ISPOR Research Excellence HEOR Application Award for a cost-effectiveness analysis showing the importance of hospital investment in nursing compliance with international guidelines for pressure-injury prevention.
The ISPOR Award for Excellence in Health Economics and Outcomes Research Methodology is presented annually for a distinguished paper that advances the field of outcomes research and is expected to have a substantial impact on the field with anticipated wide acceptance and application by others.
Padula’s research explores the theoretical foundations of medical cost-effectiveness analysis, especially pertaining to issues around the value of vaccines, healthcare delivery and patient safety in hospitals for acquired conditions such as pressure injuries. He served as president of the U.S. National Pressure Injury Advisory Panel from 2021-2022.
Founded in 1995, ISPOR—the International Society of Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research—has more than 19,000 individual and chapter members from 110+ countries worldwide.
Padula is the second USC faculty member to receive the ISPOR Award for Excellence in Health Economics and Outcomes Research Methodology in recent years. Darius Lakdawalla—Quintiles Chair in Pharmaceutical Development and Regulatory Innovation at USC Mann and chief scientific officer at the Schaeffer Center—received the award in 2021 for his paper “Health Technology Assessment with Risk Aversion in Health.”