Team

John E. Schneider, PhD – CEO & Principal
John E. Schneider is the CEO and founder of Avalon Health Economics. Dr. Schneider was one of the founding partners of the Health Economics Consulting Group, LLC (HECG), which formed in 2004. HECG merged with the UK-based Oxford Outcomes in 2009, and from 2009-2013 Dr. Schneider served as Senior Director of the U.S. health economics operations of Oxford Outcomes, which also included facilitating integration between Oxford Outcomes and ICON plc in 2011. He started Avalon Health Economics in 2013 by bringing together the consulting practices of several industry and academic colleagues, building on what he started with HECG in 2004. Prior to starting HECG, Dr. Schneider was on the faculty in the Department of Health Management and Policy and the Department of Economics at the University of Iowa. His PhD is in Health Services and Policy Analysis from the University of California Berkeley, with a concentration in health economics. He has over 25 years of experience studying economic and organizational aspects of the health care industry, including professional appointments at the Center for Health Economics Research (Waltham, MA; now part of RTI International), and the California Association of Health Plans (Sacramento, CA).Dr. Schneider has also served as a consultant to managed care organizations, state health departments, trade associations, medical device manufacturers, large pharmaceutical companies, and others. He has also served as an expert witness in several legal proceedings. Dr. Schneider’s expertise include: economic evaluation of new pharmaceuticals, devices, and diagnostics (including outcomes research and other forms of technology assessment); pricing and reimbursement; analysis of medical care costs (costs of illness; valuation of medical services and supplies); health insurance & managed care; regulation, hospital competition, and health care markets; specialty hospitals; physician ownership; contracting; antitrust; and trademark infringement. Some of his research has been published in Medical Care Research and Review, International Journal of Healthcare Finance and Economics, Tobacco Control, Health Economics Review, Health Affairs, Inquiry, Health Services Research, Review of Industrial Organization, International Journal of Technology Assessment in Health Care, American Journal of Medical Science, Prevention Science, and Health Care Financing Review. He is co-author of The Business of Health (AEI Press, 2006).

Andrew Briggs, D.Phil, MSc – Director & Principal
Andrew Briggs, D.Phil, MSc, is a Director at Avalon Health Economics. Dr. Briggs is primarily responsible for project direction, scientific advising, and training and mentoring of our health economists and researchers. He has extensive experience conducting economic evaluation analyses globally, and adapting models across health systems. Andrew has a DPhil in Health Economics and an MSc in Applied Statistics, both from the University of Oxford. He currently holds the Lindsay Chair in Health Economics at the University of Glasgow, and has acted as advisor to the UK Department of Health, the UK National Institute of Clinical Excellence and a number of pharmaceutical companies. Andrew is an integral part of Avalon’s capability in health economics. He has extensive experience of all aspects of health economic evaluation, policy and reimbursement processes. He has published extensively on the topic of cost effectiveness analysis and economic evaluation, and served on numerous committees on economic evaluation methodology and standard practices, including four ISPOR Task Forces on Good Research Practices (Clinical Trials, Modelling, Risk Sharing and Health State Utility Measurement). He is also lead author of the widely cited textbook Decision Modeling for Health Economic Evaluation (with Karl Claxton and Mark Sculpher; Oxford University Press 2006) and is an editor at the journal Health Economics. He is currently on sabbatical at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York where he is looking at the value of oncology products.

Cara M. Scheibling – Director & Principal
Cara is a Director and Principal at Avalon Health Economics, responsible for general, overall company management and the management and overseeing of a portfolio of AHE projects. In addition to her role in business management and development, Cara also manages projects across all of Avalon’s practice areas. Her focus is on cost accounting, cost analysis, and economic valuation. With more than 10 years of experience in health economics, Cara has developed expertise in developing cost estimates for economic models of pharmaceuticals and medical devices, developing unit cost measures for model adaptations, and estimating reasonable costs of medical services in a variety of health care litigation applications. In addition to experience and skills in cost modelling in Excel, she has extensive experience in health policy analysis and technical writing. Prior to joining Avalon Health Economics, Cara has been a Health Economist and Policy Analyst at Oxford Outcomes, Ltd. At Oxford, she contributed to studies of ambulatory surgery center economic impact, orthopedic surgeon ownership of ancillary services, hospital access, and cost analysis for litigation support projects and health policy analyses. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science with a minor in Business from Drew University.

Sarah Acaster, MSc.
Sarah has over 15 years’ experience in outcomes research, initially as an academic researcher, and subsequently in a research consultancy role. She has led COA teams in the US and Europe working as a Director for ICON Plc and Oxford Outcomes. I established my own consultancy in 2013 in order to reconnect to the research front line and offer bespoke consulting; happily, this led to collaboration with Andrew and the creation of Acaster-Lloyd Consulting in 2017. Her research and consultancy interests span the entire lifecycle of drug development, from concept scoping to licensing, reimbursement and beyond. As well as her experience in the development, selection and use of COAs, she has particular expertise in utility and preference-based studies, including conjoint analysis, secondary analysis of COA data and more specifically the interpretation of COA data. She is also interested in COA strategy and has provided consultancy to clients in relation to their FDA, EMA and HTA regulatory strategies. She is also an active member of ISPOR and ISOQOL, regularly involved in teaching workshops related to patient-reported outcome (PRO) development, COA interpretation and utility studies. She is also a co-editor of Value in Health.

Andrew Lloyd, DPhil.
Andy’s background is in PRO research, with considerable experience in patient preferences/utilities. He has held senior positions at ICON plc, Oxford Outcomes and United BioSource Corporation in London. He has also held research posts at several universities within the UK and supervised several students at masters and doctoral level. He teaches each year at the University of York on a residential course concerned with health outcomes measurement and he holds a research affiliation with University of Bath, UK. His research work is focused on developing and testing assessments of health-related quality of life with a particular focus on utility measurement. He has undertaken work to support HTA or regulatory submissions in a broad range of therapeutic areas including oncology, rare diseases, autoimmune disease as well as work on medical devices. Apart from that he is an active member of ISPOR, where he teaches on their short course programs in the EU and US. He is also a co-editor of Value in Health, sits on the international advisory board for the journal Quality of Life Research and is active in the EuroQol Group where he sits on the Executive Committee. He has chaired many international advisory boards designed to explore reimbursement and market access issues.