Spencer Receives Award at Early Career Symposium – Center for Health Decision Science

Jennifer Spencer, a postdoctoral fellow at CHDS, received the award for the best oral presentation at the 8^th annual Dana Farber/Harvard Cancer Center’s Celebration of Early Career Investigators in Cancer Research. Held on November 4^th, the symposium featured presentations by students, postdocs, and early faculty working in cancer population sciences.

Spencer is a first-year postdoctoral fellow in the Training in Oncology Population Sciences program. Her presented work, titled “Cost-Effectiveness of Interventions to Increase HPV Vaccine Coverage,” compared the cost and cancer reduction associated with three interventions to increase HPV vaccine uptake. The study used published evidence on the effectiveness of provider-targeted quality improvement visits, patient reminders, and school-located vaccination programs to assess the long-term value of each program relative to the implementation costs for an average US state. Using a dynamic transmission model of HPV infection to simulate the effect of these programs over a 50-year period, Spencer found that all three interventions would be considered cost-effective relative to no intervention. Comparing the three interventions to each other, she found that school-located vaccination, while the most expensive, generally had sufficient benefit to be considered cost-effective relative to the other two interventions. This work suggests that States should consider allocating additional resources to interventions to help increase HPV vaccination, as they provide a high value through preventing future cancers.

Learn more: Resource Pack: Cervical Cancer Models