Health economics and outcomes research (HEOR) has never been more visible or more scrutinized. Across the product lifecycle, biopharmaceutical organizations are asking more of their evidence investments: Market access teams need differentiated value stories; medical affairs teams need credible, stakeholder-relevant narratives; and policy and advocacy teams need context on burden, barriers, and inequities. Meanwhile, field teams require evidence that resonates in real-world conversations, and leadership wants to know whether HEOR is informing enterprise decisions or simply generating standalone studies.

That shift is exposing the limitations of traditional HEOR models.

At times, HEOR is approached as a series of tactical deliverables (e.g., standalone burden-of-illness study, one-time retrospective claims analysis, a publication plan developed downstream after product launch). These “plug-and-play” efforts often serve an individual product (and serve it well), but can fail to answer the larger question: How does evidence generated create value across the enterprise?

In 2026, leading organizations are moving beyond isolated studies toward integrated evidence strategies that meet the needs of key internal stakeholders. They are asking what evidence to generate, when generate it, how to align it to lifecycle needs, and how to ensure it can be used across functions, from access and reimbursement to medical, policy, and commercial decision-making.

At Avalere Health, we see HEOR as a strategic growth driver. The organizations that will get the most from their HEOR investments are those that design evidence with the end use in mind: access, differentiation, internal alignment, and measurable return on investment (ROI).

Why Traditional HEOR Models Are Falling Short

The pressure on HEOR teams is rising as the evidence environment is becoming more complex. Payers are demanding more robust demonstrations of value. Providers and health systems are looking for practical evidence that reflects real-world care delivery, while patients, caregivers, and advocacy communities are increasingly shaping value perception. In crowded therapeutic areas, evidence is often one of the few remaining levers for meaningful differentiation.

A common challenge is over-reliance on claims-only data. Claims datasets can be powerful, but on their own they often miss the clinical nuance, care context, and patient experience needed to answer today’s most important strategic questions. Biomarker status, line of therapy, severity, social context, provider decision-making, and lived experience are frequently essential to the story, but not fully visible in traditional secondary sources.

Another issue is fragmentation. Evidence plans are too often disconnected from launch timing, access strategy, or cross-functional priorities. A study that is methodologically sound may arrive too late, answer the wrong question, or lack relevance for downstream teams. In those cases, HEOR outputs struggle to gain traction beyond their immediate use case.

Organizations also face a growing internal challenge: demonstrating HEOR ROI. When outputs are developed for a single audience and not structured for broader utility, it becomes difficult to show how evidence investments are supporting brand strategy, market access, stakeholder engagement, or long-term portfolio decisions.

Finally, traditional HEOR models often fail to fully address non-payer perspectives. In many categories, the most compelling evidence strategy now requires a broader aperture—one that incorporates patients, providers, caregivers, health systems, and the policy context. Mixed methods approaches are increasingly essential when the goal is to understand unmet need, barriers to care, treatment decision making, and what truly differentiates a product in practice.

The result is a gap between what HEOR produces and what the enterprise needs.

The New Market Reality: Evidence Must Do More

Modern HEOR must serve multiple purposes at once. It must help organizations:

• Define disease burden and unmet need early enough to shape market perception
• Support trial design and endpoint selection with a clearer understanding of real-world gaps
• Inform launch readiness with evidence that aligns to payer and provider expectations
• Drive access strategy and patient support program development
• Inform patient advocacy direction and opportunity
• Differentiate products in crowded markets where clinical profiles alone may not be enough
• Demonstrate internal value by creating outputs that can be used across teams and over time

This is especially important in environments where data maturity is low, disease understanding is still evolving, or a product enters a crowded market that threatens to drown out its value story. In those settings, the question is not simply whether evidence exists, but rather whether the right evidence is being generated in the right sequence to support strategic decision making.

A Lifecycle Lens: Four HEOR Archetypes, Four Strategic Needs

HEOR strategies should be customized The most effective approach depends on where the asset (or the organization) sits in its lifecycle. Below, we describe four archetypes, each with distinct evidence needs and opportunities for impact.

Archetype 1: Early pipeline shaping burden of disease and market

For pre-Phase III and early Phase III assets, the central challenge is defining the problem before asking the market to value the solution.

At this stage, HEOR teams need to establish unmet need, characterize disease burden, and understand how patients move through care in the real world. They may also need to identify how disease burden varies across subpopulations, geographies, provider settings, or social risk factors. In many cases, this is also the point when teams begin to shape stakeholder understanding of the condition itself, particularly in underdiagnosed, heterogeneous, or poorly characterized disease areas.

Traditional approaches can fall short here because they over-index on what is readily available in secondary data and under-invest in the contextual insights that shape early strategy. Claims data alone rarely tells the full story. It may quantify utilization, costs, and treatment patterns, but not fully explain why gaps exist, where friction occurs, or how stakeholders perceive the burden of disease.

This is where integrated primary and secondary research becomes especially valuable. Mixed methods can combine structured real-world data with qualitative insights from patients, providers, and caregivers to illuminate care pathways, barriers to diagnosis or treatment, and sources of inequity. Contextual social determinants of health analyses can further clarify where and for whom unmet need is greatest. Provider mapping and geographic clustering can help identify where disease burden concentrates and where future engagement may matter most.

Avalere Health’s differentiated approach in this phase is to integrate policy and market access foresight from the beginning. Rather than treating early evidence generation as a standalone epidemiology exercise, we help clients generate evidence that not only characterizes the market, but begins to shape it. That means asking early: What will payers, providers, advocacy groups, and health systems need to see later? What evidence gaps could become obstacles at launch if left unaddressed now?

When done well, early pipeline HEOR creates strategic positioning and gives organizations evidence that can prime the market, sharpen development decisions, and begin influencing stakeholder perception before launch.

Archetype 2: Peri-launch unmet need and market priming

As assets move through Phase III and into immediate pre-launch, the evidence mandate shifts. The question is no longer only what the burden is, but how to translate the evidence into a compelling, credible narrative that supports access and adoption.

This is a pivotal stage because the risk of misalignment is high. HEOR teams may have robust clinical data but still lack the contextual evidence needed for payer conversations, field readiness, or value communication. They may also have multiple evidence streams that do not yet add up to a coherent story about unmet need, standard-of-care gaps, or why the product matters in practice.

At this stage, organizations need more than “hard data.” They need evidence that reflects market dynamics and stakeholder expectations. That includes a clear articulation of where current care falls short, which patient populations face the greatest unmet need, how providers think about existing treatment options, and what barriers may shape real-world uptake.

Mixed methods are often especially powerful here because they connect measurable burden with clinical and non-clinical contexts. Quantitative analyses can show treatment gaps, utilization patterns, resource burden, or disparities in care. Qualitative work can explain why those gaps persist and what stakeholders find meaningful. Together, those approaches create a richer foundation for value narratives, field tools, and launch communications.

Avalere Health brings an evidence-for-access lens to this phase. We focus on generating evidence that is publication-worthy and will drive launch strategies. We help clients understand unmet need in the context of real market dynamics and convene cross-functional discussions to shape follow-on evidence strategy. That internal alignment is often as important as the analysis itself. When HEOR, market access, medical, and commercial teams are working from the same evidence foundation, the launch narrative becomes more cohesive and more credible.

The result is stronger market priming: a clearer, better-supported story that prepares stakeholders for launch and supports more effective engagement from day one.

Archetype 3: Post-launch differentiation and ROI demonstration

For products in their first one to two years on the market, HEOR plays another role: proving value in a competitive environment while demonstrating that evidence investments are paying off.

This is often where organizations feel the greatest pressure. Clinical differentiation may be narrower than expected, competitive entries may crowd the market, and internal stakeholders may ask whether HEOR is influencing decisions, supporting uptake, or creating broader enterprise value. In this setting, the stakes are no longer just external; HEOR teams must show internal impact as well.

Strategic needs in this phase often include treatment satisfaction, comparative performance, real-world differentiation, and dissemination planning. Teams may need to understand where the product is succeeding or lagging across patient segments, provider types, or access environments. They may also need to tailor outputs for multiple audiences at once: payers, providers, field teams, leadership, and publication channels.

This is where portfolio-level thinking becomes critical. A post-launch evidence program should not be built study by study without an overarching plan. Instead, evidence should be structured to answer a set of linked questions across stakeholders and time horizons. Which insights support access discussions? Which support medical engagement? Which are publication priorities? Which help show internal ROI by informing brand strategy or future investment decisions?

Avalere Health’s post-launch work is designed around enterprise utility. We help clients slice data across stakeholder needs, evaluate and incorporate novel data partnerships, and build dissemination strategies that extend the value of each evidence asset. Rather than producing isolated outputs, we focus on creating an evidence ecosystem that supports differentiation and makes HEOR investment more justifiable, visible, and defensible.

In a crowded market, post-launch HEOR must do more than document outcomes. It must help tell the story of why a product matters and show that the evidence function itself is contributing measurable strategic value.

Archetype 4: Advanced HEOR teams seeking elevation

Some organizations are not looking for help integrating HEOR into the enterprise. They have already done that work and have mature, credible, and well-connected HEOR capabilities. For organizations like these, the question is how to get to the next level.

They often want to understand where their evidence posture lags competitors, which novel data sources are worth pursuing, how to optimize portfolios across assets, and how to benchmark their evidence approach against a changing market. They may also be looking for stronger ways to articulate ROI internally, particularly when leadership expects evidence functions to influence broader business decisions.

This is where external perspective matters. Mature HEOR teams can benefit from a partner that brings cross-client, cross-market visibility and can identify gaps that are difficult to see from within a single organization. They may need support in evaluating new real-world data sources, designing more complex analytics, or framing evidence strategy across a portfolio instead of around individual brands.

Avalere Health’s role in these cases is to extend and amplify existing capabilities. We bring portfolio-wide strategy, sophisticated real-world analytics, integrated strategic frameworks, and a sharper view of how evidence can move beyond single-study thinking. The goal is not more activity, but greater leverage.

For advanced HEOR teams, success means elevating HEOR from a respected function to a true enterprise driver that informs access, differentiation, and long-range portfolio strategy.

What Differentiation Looks Like in Practice

Across all four archetypes, the common thread is that HEOR has to be built for impact. In practice, this looks like:

• Starting with the decision context, not just the data source
• Designing evidence around stakeholder needs across the lifecycle
• Combining methods when secondary data alone cannot answer the question
• Creating outputs that are usable across teams, rather than narrowly tailored to a single endpoint or publication objective

Avalere Health’s differentiation comes from this integrated approach.

We connect advisory perspectives across HEOR, market access, policy, and stakeholder strategy, bringing an evidence-for-access mindset that keeps downstream use in view from the outset. We apply mixed methods and novel data sourcing when the question demands more than conventional approaches and help clients move from single-study execution to portfolio-level evidence strategy.

That matters because the market is no longer rewarding evidence volume alone. It is rewarding evidence relevance, evidence timing, and evidence usability.

A New Standard for HEOR Value

The most effective HEOR programs in 2026 will not be defined by the number of studies completed, but rather how well evidence supports the enterprise and its business goals.

Organizations that continue to rely on plug-and-play models risk generating evidence that cannot be widely applied, however accurate. Organizations that adopt an integrated, lifecycle-based strategy have the opportunity to position HEOR as a driver of enterprise impact.

At Avalere Health, we believe the future of HEOR belongs to organizations that treat evidence as a strategic asset, not a standalone output. By aligning methods, timing, and stakeholder needs across the lifecycle, HEOR can help shape decisions. To learn more about our capabilities and where we can assist you, connect with us.