Enhancing Decision Making for New Vaccine Development and Health Policy

The Institute of Medicine has developed SMART Vaccines-a decision support software system that offers the promise of enhancing decision making about the priorities for developing new vaccines and prioritizing for deployment among existing vaccines. It can also be used to help specify desirable vaccine characteristics, and potentially applied in comparing and prioritizing among a wider array of public health interventions for policy planning.

With a major innovation, SMART Vaccines allows users to specify their own weights on attributes considered important in ranking vaccines, unlike previous ranking tools that imposed a single ranking criterion like life years saved or cost-effectiveness associated with the vaccine. SMART Vaccines includes a broader range of vaccine attributes from which users can choose for ranking their vaccine development priorities. This talk will present the analytical framework underpinning SMART Vaccines, and interactively demonstrate the software tool using decision scenarios, and explore how schools of public health can actively engage in the future enhancements of the software and data warehouse.

Speakers: Charles Phelps, Ph.D., University Professor and Provost Emeritus, Univ of Rochester; Guru Madhavan, Ph.D., Senior Program Officer, Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences