We bring together the various specialties of medicine, epidemiology, biostatistics, health services research, legal, regulatory and the social sciences to evaluate the effectiveness of prescription drugs in relation to their risks and costs; to study how medications are prescribed by physicians and used by patients; to develop methods to optimize prescription drug use; to understand how medicines are approved and regulated after their marketing.

By combining health economics, medical decision science, and clinical medicine we conduct cost-effectiveness analyses to quantify the value of medications, which patient subgroups will experience the largest value, and how value-based contracts should be structured. Researchers from legal and regulatory science, health policy, and medical ethics develop and test models that improve affordability and access to needed medications.

The Division is a major training site for masters and doctoral students from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard Medical School, and other Harvard graduate programs. We welcome highly-qualified post-doctoral fellows from training programs around the world.

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Critical questions in understanding medication use and effectiveness are best answered by blending a range of discipline experts. The Division, therefore, brings together physicians with a variety of clinical backgrounds (e.g., primary care, hospitalist care, geriatrics, rheumatology, cardiology, nephrology, anesthesiology), with the skills of quantitative science (e.g., epidemiology, biostatistics, decision science, computer science) and other relevant disciplines (e.g., health policy, law, regulatory science, social science, science communication).

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