Dr Sameera Senanayake | Singapore General Hospital

Dr Sameera Senanayake
Senior Principal Research Scientists, Health Economist
Programme in Health Services Research & Population Health
Duke-NUS Medical School

Sameera Senanayake, PhD, is a Senior Principal Research Scientist at Duke-NUS Medical School, Singapore, and a health economist specialising in health services research. His work focuses on cost-effectiveness analysis, discrete choice experiments, and the use of real-world evidence to inform healthcare decision-making and policy. Sameera leads and contributes to large multidisciplinary programmes spanning cardiovascular disease, kidney disease, oncology, and digital mental health, with a strong emphasis on translating economic evidence into practice in both high-income and resource-constrained settings.

He has published extensively in high-impact international journals and is actively involved in methodological research and capacity-building initiatives across the Asia-Pacific region and South Asia. Sameera also supervises PhD students, with a strong focus on capacity development and mentoring, and regularly contributes to international conferences and policy dialogues. His current interests include preference-informed economic evaluation, implementation-focused modelling, and strengthening the role of health economics in health system reform.

Session:

Symposium 3
Bridging Evidence and Practice in Heart Failure Care: Real-World Gaps, and Pathways to High-Value Care in Singapore
17 April 2026, 1330 - 1500, NAK Auditorium

Presenting Title:

From Guidelines to Practice: Understanding Gaps in Real-World Heart Failure Care
This lecture draws on linked national administrative and clinical data to illustrate gaps between guideline recommendations and real-world practice, including under-prescription, suboptimal dosing, and poor persistence of evidence-based therapies. We highlight how clinical risk aversion, fragmented care pathways, and institutional variation contribute to these gaps, even among patients without absolute contraindications. These quantitative findings are complemented by in-depth qualitative interviews with clinicians, nurses, and pharmacists, which reveal high trust in guidelines but variable familiarity and confidence in their application and concerns around treating older patients with multimorbidity, renal impairment, and low blood pressure. The presentation then adopts a health services research lens to show how these practice patterns translate into avoidable hospitalisations, end-of-life cost escalation, and lost health gains. Then, we discuss how implementation-focused economic evaluation can inform pragmatic strategies for scaling up high-value care, beyond assessing cost-effectiveness alone.

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