Most people in HEOR arrived sideways and are expected to catch up with colleagues who've done nothing but health economics for a decade. Realistically you can't close that gap easily, at least not by reading papers at the weekend. So I built HEOR Fundamentals: eleven modules plus an AI bonus, an end-to-end case study, and live Q&As, ordered the way the field is best learned. The founding cohort is open now for registration.

If you trained as a pharmacist, a nurse, a doctor, a biostatistician, or anything adjacent, and then somehow ended up in HEOR, you'll know the feeling I mean. You've heard terms like PSA, QALY and ITC plenty of times, you can hold your end of the conversation, and yet the colleagues with formal health economics training always seems to be a step ahead. It's a frustrating place to be, because the gap is real and nobody hands you an obvious way to close it.

If you've moved laterally into a market access role, you're expected to catch up with someone who has done HEOR and nothing but HEOR for more than ten years. Realistically, you can't do that. There aren't enough weekends. And yet your manager still expects it, because that's the job you were hired to do.

Take me for example. I did five years at university, six in consulting, and another four in pharma, and there are still corners of this field where I'm catching up. That's coming from someone who had the nerve to start a business in this space and ask people to pay for the expertise. So if even that path leaves gaps, the idea that you'll close yours by reading a few more papers between deadlines was never realistic.

In 2026, the fundamental problem isn't a shortage of information. It's everywhere now, democratised by AI, only one prompt away. The hard part is knowing what to focus on and in what order, because left to chance you learn HEOR the way most of us did, in whatever sequence the work happened to throw at you. You learn survival analysis because a submission needs it. You learn budget impact because you suddenly work with a US client. You learn how to present an ICER to people who don't think in QALYs because you interact with non-technical stakeholders. This approach works, eventually, but it's slow, and for years you can't even see the edges of what you don't know.

That's the problem I set out to solve, and the result is a course called HEOR Fundamentals. It's a structured training program for people who landed in a job that doesn't quite match their background, made a sideways career move, or simply want a curated, step-by-step path through the field rather than a pile of disconnected resources. It's self-paced, and you can finish it in under ten hours.

It's built as eleven modules plus a bonus section, around six to eight hours of short, pre-recorded lessons, taught in the order the material is best learned rather than the order a textbook would list it. You start by mapping out what HEOR actually is, with concepts like opportunity cost in healthcare explained in a way that sticks. From there you learn to think and talk like a health economist, so QALYs, ICERs and willingness-to-pay stop being jargon you nod along to and start being tools you can use. You'll cover the different types of economic model and how they're built in Excel, R and other platforms, and how major markets like the UK, Germany and the US each decide what gets funded. Then you'll get into where our evidence comes from, through systematic literature reviews, meta-analysis and real-world evidence, and the statistics you need to read any of it. You don't need fancy maths for this. If I could learn it, so can you!

Everything in the course has to earn its place by being useful in an actual HEOR or market access role, which is why it ends in a full end-to-end case study that makes you apply every module rather than just nod at it. And because big pharma can’t ignore AI (just like anyone else), there's a bonus module on where AI actually helps in HEOR and where it doesn't, which conveniently lets you tick the AI box on your personal objectives. On top of that you get a live Q&A session with me, worked examples, downloadable cheat sheets, knowledge checks, and a certificate of completion.

The part I care most about is how it's built. Most corporate learning is either dull enough to forget by lunchtime or entertaining enough that you feel great after but learn nothing. HEOR Fundamentals is built on the science of learning, using what decades of research tell us about how people actually remember things, so what you cover sticks instead of evaporating the moment you close the tab. It's also practical rather than academic. Instead of a grey-haired professor who rarely leaves his books behind, you get someone who's spent over a decade doing this on both sides of the fence, in pharma and in consulting.

It's designed for people in the early-to-mid stretch of a career in market access, pricing, HEOR or medical affairs, or anyone who's moved in from an adjacent field like clinical work, pharmacy, biostatistics or consulting. If you've been in health economics for twenty years I'd like to think you'd still find something worth taking away, but I won't pretend it's built for you.

A few specifics, because you'll want them before you decide. The founding cohort is open now at £950, for a limited number of seats, and that's the lowest the price will be. The course starts on the 15th of September, and if the cohort doesn't reach the numbers to run properly, you're refunded in full. So being early costs you nothing and locks in the best rate it'll ever offer. If you're not ready to commit, you can join the waitlist and still hold the founding rate.

Most people will expense this through their employer, and there's a ready-made approval email you can download from the landing page to send your manager. Done right, the course doubles as one of your personal development goals for the year, so it's worth a look before you reach for your own card. If your company won't fund it and you decide to back yourself anyway, I appreciate it more than I can say here.

And if you want to check where you stand before spending anything, run yourself through the free HEOR Roadmap first. It'll give you a personalised read on your gaps, which is a sensible way to decide whether this course is the right next step or whether you're better served by the free videos.

Prefer video? Watch the full announcement on YouTube!

For those of you who came into HEOR from somewhere else, what was the one concept that took you far too long to properly understand? The thing that, once it clicked, made a chunk of the field suddenly make sense.

Hit reply and tell me, I’m always curious to hear what you think! 💬

Across 12 domains, the HEOR roadmap is a quick self-assessment against the 120 core skills of the field. Download it for free in less than 30 seconds, or spend 10 minutes customising it for a personalised breakdown of your gaps and what to work on next.

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.