Editorial – fall 2014

With this special issue of the PRO Newsletter, we are pleased to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Mapi.
For four decades we have been championing the voice of the patient as the foundation of health care. We believe that the success of Life Science is not the absence of symptoms but, rather, the improvement of an individual’s quality of life and that the success of treatment can only be measured with real-world evidence.
In 1974 we, as Mapi, joined a world that was ready to move beyond treating disease. Our mission to improve the quality of life for patients and their families has enabled us to contribute to regulatory guidelines, pioneer methodologies to support global research, and establish our unique expertise.
Together we originated the research field of finding the measures that help assess patient outcomes. We pioneered the process by participating in the development of these instruments including their psychometric validation, as well as by making those instruments both accessible and usable globally by validating them culturally and linguistically. We established the science of managing global registries and post- approval research of therapies, monitoring their safety, and giving the patients that depend on those treatments a voice on the value of those treatments.
We helped researchers identify the economics that make treatments available globally and our data has helped government agencies and life- science companies gain valuable insights for better decision-making on therapies, pharmaceuticals, biologicals, and medical devices.
At Mapi we are more than a company. We are people united by our ideals, our experiences, and our unified drive to listening to patients.
Today, with nearly 500 direct employees and a network of over 650 contractors around the world, we are happy and proud of the emphasis on the patient’s voice.
We are confident that this importance will grow in the future and contribute to the improvement of health care and, therefore, the patients’ quality of life.