CHDS faculty Jagpreet Chhatwal, together with collaborator Rachael Fleurence, has received the Society for Medical Decision Making’s John M. Eisenberg Award for Practical Application of Medical Decision Making Research. The award recognizes their decade-long collaborative work translating decision science into national hepatitis C elimination policy, culminating in direct influence on deliberations by the White House, U.S. Congress, and the Congressional Budget Office.
To extend impact beyond publication, Chhatwal developed two decision-support platforms, the Hep C Calculator (with the World Health Organization) and the Hep C State Policy Simulator (with the CDC), that enabled all 50 states and Washington, DC to model state-specific screening, treatment, and pricing policies. His team has further extended elimination feasibility modeling to Pakistan, China, Rwanda, and Georgia, building a global evidence base.
Fleurence, serving as Senior Advisor to Dr. Francis Collins (former NIH Director and Acting Science Advisor to the President), brought complementary federal policy expertise. Beginning in 2022, Drs. Fleurence and Collins engaged Chhatwal to adapt his modeling framework to meet Congressional Budget Office scoring requirements.
The awarded work is exemplified by the Cure Hepatitis C Act of 2025 (introduced June 2025 by Senators Bill Cassidy and Chris Van Hollen), whose Congressional Budget Office scoring drew directly on Chhatwal’s National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working paper projecting that elimination would avert tens of thousands of premature deaths, reduce hepatitis C prevalence by up to 90%, and generate billions in net healthcare savings across Medicare, Medicaid, and private payers.
Learn more: Read the NBER working paper, Projected Health Benefits and Health Care Savings from the United States National Hepatitis C Elimination Initiative
Learn more: Read the JAMA perspective, A National Hepatitis C Elimination Program in the United States: A Historic Opportunity
Related news: Chhatwal Receives ISPOR Impact Award
Related news: Chhatwal Evaluates Hepatitis C Elimination Plan at White House