From research ask to approved budget in eight moves.

Most HEOR budget conversations fail before they start and it has nothing to do with the quality of the science.

The person making the ask walks into a room full of commercial and finance leaders and starts talking about study designs, endpoints, and evidence gaps. Leadership hears: cost center, optional, academic, nice to have.

After more than two decades working across HEOR, market access, and global launch strategy, I've watched brilliant teams lose budget battles they should have won. The problem was rarely the evidence plan. It was the framing.

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Here are eight moves that work:

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1) Anchor HEOR to what leadership is already worried about

Nobody in the C-suite wakes up thinking about cost-effectiveness models. They wake up thinking about time to access, net price protection, and revenue at risk.

Connect those two worlds.

Present HEOR as the engine behind priorities leadership already cares about: Market access, reimbursement, pricing strategy, competitive differentiation, lifecycle defense.

Speak their language first and the science will follow.

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2) Price the cost of doing nothing

This is the most underused argument in HEOR advocacy. Everyone focuses on the value of funding the work. Flip it.

What happens if this evidence gap isn't filled?

• Delayed access.
• Restricted formulary placement.
• A weaker HTA submission.
• A pricing concession that didn't need to happen.

Model it out. Even a rough estimate (X months of access delay equals Y in lost revenue) changes the tenor of the conversation.

Risk is a language leadership understands immediately.

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3) Put HEOR on the launch timeline, not in a separate document

Take your HEOR deliverables off a standalone slide and map them directly against launch milestones.

Show when payer value dossiers are due, when HTA submissions open, and which evidence study needs to be complete before which decision gate.

Make it visual. When leadership sees that a study needs to start now to be ready for a submission 18 months out, urgency becomes self-evident.

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4) Show discipline by cutting what doesn't drive a decision

Budget requests that look like wish lists get cut. Requests that look like surgical precision get funded.

Be ruthless about prioritization.

• Which studies directly influence a payer decision?
• Which evidence fills a documented HTA or formulary gap?
• Which outputs can be leveraged across markets?

When you have already made the hard choices, you're a business partner, not an academic building a research portfolio.

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5) Borrow credibility from comparable launches

Skeptical leadership isn't always skeptical of HEOR, they're skeptical of your specific ask.

Defuse that with external benchmarks.

• What does HEOR investment typically look like for launches in this therapy area or disease stage?
• What happened to access outcomes when comparable evidence packages were or weren't in place?
• What evidence strategy did your most successful competitor use?

This reframes the conversation from 'Why are you asking for this?' to 'This is standard practice, why wouldn't we fund it?'

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6) Build your coalition before you walk into the room

A budget request from one function feels departmental. The same request backed by Market Access, Pricing & Contracting, Medical Affairs, and Commercial feels enterprise-critical.

Do the pre-work.

Align with cross-functional partners before the formal ask. Let them know what you're requesting and why it matters for their outcomes too.

The most powerful words in a budget meeting are not yours, they're someone from a different function saying, 'We need this too.'

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7) Tell the ROI story, even if you can't prove the ROI

Nobody expects a perfect ROI model for HEOR. But they do expect you to have thought about it.

• What decisions will this investment inform?
• What risks does it protect against?
• What commercial opportunities does it open?

Frame HEOR as decision insurance. You're not buying research, you're buying the ability to make better decisions at critical value and access moments.

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8) Give leadership options, not ultimatums

Come in with a tiered approach: a minimum viable HEOR package that covers the non-negotiable gaps, an optimal evidence strategy that enables a full access play, and an expansion scenario tied to specific access milestones.

When you offer choices, you shift the dynamic from 'Should we fund this?' to 'Which version makes sense for where we are?' That's a far easier conversation to win.

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Stop thinking like a researcher. Start thinking like an access strategist.

The HEOR teams that consistently win budget fights have made one fundamental shift in how they see themselves.

They stopped being scientists asking for money to do research. They became access strategists making the case for protecting the asset's commercial potential.

The evidence still matters.

The rigor still matters.

But the conversation that gets it funded is a business conversation, not a scientific one.

Master that conversation, and the science gets to do its job.

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Betsy J. Lahue is CEO of Alkemi, a life sciences consulting firm specializing in HEOR, Market Access, and Market Shaping. Alkemi has contributed to launches representing tens of billions in global sales.

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