Joel Hay looked around the table at the founding group for the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research in 1995 and counted 24 colleagues. Not many, he thought, for a field that takes a vital critical look at the benefits per dollar spent on drugs and medical procedures.

What a difference a dozen years makes. Today ISPOR has more than 3,000 members and holds annual international meetings in North America and Europe. And the skills of the pioneering professor of pharmaceutical economics and policy at the USC School of Pharmacy have never been in such high demand.

As health care costs soar, Hay’s studies on the most effective ways to achieve health outcomes give much needed objective insight. "As health-care costs go up faster than rest of economy, it’s more critical that services have value and are justified in terms of costs," he notes.

While Hay celebrates the fact that the health care field is creating high-paying jobs and life-saving innovations, he would like to see better monitoring of drugs once they hit the market. Here, he says, pharmacists could play a bigger role with a new system that would compensate for following up on prescriptions and reporting outcomes. "Right now doctors only sometimes report adverse drug reactions to the FDA ," he says. "We need better systems to make sure the drugs we're taking aren't increasing our overall risks."

Hay says he is proudest of training a new generation of Ph.D. and masters students in pharmacoeconomics, like the two USC Masters' degree program graduates who, working at Kaiser, were key researchers in the Lancet study that helped push the withdrawal of Vioxx. "They probably saved thousands of lives in this country and around the world," he says. Even with a steady stream of graduates, however, "we still have more job offers than we have alumni." At least it’s a big improvement from 24.