Irina Cleemput is Senior Health Economist and Scientific Director at the Belgian Health Care Knowledge Centre (KCE). She graduated as PhD in Health Economics at the KULeuven in 2003 and combined academic teaching as visiting professor at the KULeuven and the UHasselt with policy research at KCE for several years. During these years she was also Director of INAHTA (2009 – 2015) and co-editor of Health Policy. Her main area of expertise lies in the domain of Health Technology Assessments, research on drug reimbursement decision making processes, the use of patient and public preferences in reimbursement decision making and the development of evidence-based needs-driven healthcare innovation and policy. Irina was involved in several national and international studies on patient-centred decision-making in healthcare policy.  Besides project work, she also worked on concretizing positions of the KCE regarding patient involvement in research, by developing a practical process guide for patient involvement and supporting KCE research teams in their endeavors to involve patients meaningfully in their research projects.

Currently, Irina leads a large project on the identification of unmet health-related patient and societal needs (NEED), which was launched during the Belgian Presidency of the Council of the European Union as one of the building blocks for a more needs-driven healthcare innovation and policy.