Most of us fell into HEOR sideways and learned it in whatever order the work happened to arrive. So I built the map I never had: 120 capabilities across 12 steps, laid out as a learning path. Download it, tick what you can do today, and see exactly where your gaps are.

Almost nobody sets out to work in HEOR. You start somewhere adjacent, in medicine, statistics, health policy, a clinical role, a consulting graduate scheme, and one day you're building a cost-effectiveness model or reading a NICE appraisal and realising this is the job now. There's no degree that hands you the whole field. There's no syllabus pinned to the wall. You learn whatever the next project happens to demand, in whatever order it arrives.

That's how I learned it, across a decade at IQVIA, Parexel, and Gilead. I picked up survival analysis because a submission needed it, then AMNOG because a launch needed it, then how to actually present an ICER to people who don't think in QALYs because a meeting needed it. It worked, but it was inefficient, and for years I had no way of seeing the shape of the whole thing. I couldn't have told you what I didn't know, because I couldn't see the edges of the field.

So I drew the map I wish someone had handed me on day one. It's called the HEOR Roadmap, it's live now, and it's free.

It lays out the 120 capabilities that define excellence in HEOR, ordered the way they're best learned rather than alphabetically or by academic tidiness. Every item is a plain "I can do this" statement. You read down the list and tick the ones that are true for you today. By the end you have something most people in this field have never had: a clear picture of what the work actually contains, and a straight read on where you stand against it.

The 120 capabilities sit across 12 steps, and the order is the point. You start with foundations, how a medicine travels from trial to patient access, and the language of the field: QALY, ICER, EQ-5D, discounting, time horizons. From there it climbs through statistics and data analysis, evidence and data sources, economic modelling, market access strategy, and pricing and contracting. Then it gets concrete about the systems you actually submit into: the UK, Germany's AMNOG, and the EU, with the US as a separate step of its own. The last stretch is what took me 10+ years in industry to figure out: influence and communication, using AI well in HEOR, and the integration work where all of it finally connects.

There are two ways to use it. The fast way takes about thirty seconds: enter your email and the one-page PDF lands in your inbox, ready to print and fill in by hand. The slower and more useful way takes about ten minutes: customise it in your browser, ticking through all 120 in turn. At the end you get a score out of 120, a band that tells you roughly where you sit, and a skills radar across the 12 areas that shows your skill overview at a glance. You also get your three weakest areas called out by name, each with a free video to start closing the gap. The radar is yours to save and share, and you can help spread the word by forwarding this to someone you think might benefit from this self-assessment. Or you simply forward it to a friend to boast about your score. I won’t judge you for it, promise! 😉

You're right to wonder what the catch is on something this size being free. So here's the thinking… The Roadmap is free, and so are the videos it links to. The full map of what to learn costs you nothing, and it always will. What I sell separately is the guided way to learn it, the HEOR Fundamentals course, which you can enrol in now. Right now it’s open for the first cohort, so being early gets you the best deal: you lock in the lowest price the course will ever be, and if not enough people join to run it properly, everyone gets a full refund. Being early costs you nothing and saves you the most. The course is there at the end if you want a structured route through your gaps, and ignored entirely if you don't. Giving away the map is the most useful thing I can hand this audience for free, so that's what I'm doing.

One last thing, because it matters for how you read your own score. Nobody ticks all 120, and you're not supposed to. I don't. I built the thing and I still have soft spots on it. The point was never a perfect score. What helps is seeing your next two or three gaps clearly enough to do something about them, then coming back in a couple of months to watch the shape change. A senior career in HEOR was never about ticking every box. It comes from knowing which of the empty ones are worth filling next.

If you've ever wished someone had just shown you the whole field on one page, this is me doing that, about fifteen years later than I'd have wanted it myself.

How many of the 120 can you tick off?

If you want the long version, I recorded a full walkthrough of the Roadmap, going through all 12 steps and pulling out a few capabilities from each to show you what the map is really about. The video is over an hour long, so save it for when you've got the time to go deep!

If you could go back and hand your first-week-in-HEOR self one piece of the map, which step would it have been? The thing that took you years to learn and would have changed how you worked if you'd seen it laid out from the start.

Hit reply and tell me. I'm collecting these, and the best few are going into a future issue on what people most wish they'd learned first.

P.S. — Pharma Radar is written by Mirko von Hein. I help pharma and biotech teams navigate HTA submissions, cost-effectiveness modelling, and market access strategy across the UK, Ireland, and Germany. After a decade across IQVIA, Parexel, and Gilead, I'm now taking on selected engagements through Von Hein Consulting.