Professor Gang Chen
Gang Chen, PhD (Monash), is a health economist with training in medicine, management and health economics. He is currently serving as the Vice President of the Australian Health Economics Society (AHES) (2022-present), and an Associate Editor for the Quality of Life Research (an official journal of the International Society of Quality of Life Research, ISOQOL) (2018-present). He is also a tenured member of the International Academy of Health Preference Research (IAHPR) and co-chaired the 14th Meeting of IAHPR in 2023.
Gang’s research primarily focuses on person-centred care and he has continuously made original contributions to the field of benefit measures for economic evaluation & health preference research. In recent years, he led a multi-institute team to develop a new preference-based Disability Wellbeing Index (DWI) for people with disability (a project funded by the National Disability Insurance Agency, NDIA). Gang also significantly contributed to the development of a new preference-based instrument, Quality of Care Experience - Aged Care Consumers (QCE-ACC), which has now been adopted by the Department of Health and Aged Care and has rolled out in residential aged care nationally.
With a strong interest in cancer research, Gang led the health economic component of multiple successful (inter)national collaborative research related to economic evaluations on screening and surveillance of colorectal and oesophageal cancer. He led the choice experiment design and/or analyses of several patient preference studies with an aim to identify better strategies to improve breast, cervical and colorectal cancer screening and cancer services. His recent research also contributed to the development of a new method for reducing uncertainty in healthcare funding decisions using real-world data from prostate cancer treatments, and the exploration of different methods to elicit health utilities for economic evaluations among breast, oesophageal, gastric, and rectal cancer patients. Gang is also exploring the value of measuring the broader subjective wellbeing (that goes beyond health) and quality of care among cancer patients.
Dr Chen was an ARC DECRA Fellow. His collaborative research is supported by NHMRC, MRFF, Cancer Australia, Research Council of Norway, as well as Australian government and organisations such as the NDIA, Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety, and Transport Accident Commission (TAC). He has co-authored more than 190 peer-reviewed papers and his research outputs have been published in leading field journals such as Social Science & Medicine, Health Economics, PharmacoEconomics, Value in Health, Quality of Life Research, Medical Decision Making, Social Indicators Research, British Journal of Cancer, British Journal of Psychiatry, and Pediatrics.
Prior to the new appointment at Melbourne/Peter Mac, Gang is currently an Associate Professor at the Centre for Health Economics (CHE), Monash University. He also worked at Flinders Centre for Innovation in Cancer and Flinders Health Economics Group (2012-2016) where he received the Flinders University Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Early Career Researchers.