Paco Welsing

I am a clinical Epidemiologist and HTA researcher. My research focuses on the optimal application of health interventions in daily clinical practice with a focus on rheumatic and immunologic diseases, mainly Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) and Osteoarthritis (OA). More stratified approaches to treatment and the measurement of these treatment effects have been studied in different project, acting as project member/methodologist or (WP) lead. Examples are the CTMM TRACER project focussing on the clinical and health-economic evaluation of personalized approached to diagnosis and treatment of RA, the IMI APPROACH project focussing on exploring phenotypes of osteoarthritis for stratified treatment approaches, the IMI GetReal project focusing on the use of ‘Real World’ data in drug evaluation, specifically focussing on pragmatic trial design and using data from routine practice in trials, the multicenter PATIO trial evaluating a prediction based decision aid tool for tapering biological drugs in RA, the nationwide RCT and cohort study, GODIVA, regarding the (cost-)effectiveness and optimal patient group for joint distraction in young patients with severe knee OA and the EU STRATA-FIT project focussing on difficult-to-treat RA and the development of a stratified treatment approach and decision aid using real world. As the full effects of a treatment strategy when applied in clinical practice are of interest my research naturally includes modelling the clinical effectiveness as well as cost-effectiveness on the long term. I enjoy applying/adapting state-of the art statistical and Machine Learning methods in an innovative and creative way to clinical research questions also working as a methodologist consultant for our division.