Rafael Pinedo-Villanueva

How do diseases affect people’s health and quality of life? What burden do treatments or any other type of intervention place on the healthcare system? Which decisions should healthcare systems make as they spend the limited money they have on everything they do and we expect them to do? With my work I try to answer these questions about a wide variety of diseases, with a particular interest in musculoskeletal conditions. Amongst others, I work on osteoarthritis, osteoporosis, and sarcopenia, and I have recently been very involved with rare diseases such as osteogenesis imperfecta and rickets.

I use routinely collected data (real-world evidence) to understand the journey that people with these diseases go through as they receive care, what this all costs the healthcare system, and how their quality of life is affected. I use all this information to build economic models that can then help us understand what the most efficient way of treating patients is likely to be.

I lead the health economic component of various projects lasting anywhere from one to seven years and funded primarily by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), but also by industry partners. My work is highly collaborative with multidisciplinary teams and other institutions both in the UK and internationally.

I studied Economics and Political Science, completed an MSc in Public Policy and then went on to do an MSc and PhD in Health Economics. I have studied in three different countries, likely one of the reasons why I am captivated by diversity, whether it is historical, political, cultural, or gastronomical, or simply in terms of what matters to people as they go about and make decisions in their lives.