Bio: Elizabeth Roughead is an Associate Professor at the School of Pharmacy and Medical Sciences at the University of South Australia. Her research interests include public policy concerning medicines, quality use of medicines, pharmacoepidemiology and adverse drug events. She is currently project co-director for a national initiative funded by the Commonwealth Department of Veterans' Affairs to improve medicine use in the Australian Veteran population. In 2003-04 she was a Commonwealth Fund Harkness Fellow in Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School. She has been a member of the Federal Government's expert advisory committee on Quality Use of Medicines, the Pharmaceutical Health And Rational use of Medicines (PHARM) committee. She is currently a member of the Federal Government's Drug Utilisation Sub-Committee of the Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee, the evaluation working group of the National Prescribing Service and a Board member of Therapeutic Guidelines Ltd.
Placement: Harvard University
Mentors: Stephen Soumerai, Sc.D., Harvard Medical School
Project: The Effect of Strategies Implemented within Medicaid on the Uptake on New Medicines
Description: Roughead examined the impact of fail-first and prior authorization policies on uptake of COX II inhibitors post-market entry in the Medicaid markets of the U.S. She used data on Cox II inhibitor and non-selective non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug utilization for 49 state Medicaid programs from January 1996 to September 2003, and conducted an interrupted time-series analysis on the significance of different state policies pre- and post-implementation.