Principles of Cost-Benefit Analysis, Cost-Utility Analysis, CEA, Cost-Consequences Analysis and Cost Analysis; techniques of CBA in health and health care; techniques of CUA and CEA in health and health care; techniques of CCA and CA in health and health care; decision theoretical approaches; pharmacoeco- nomics; economic evaluation of clinical devices; economic evaluation of public health interventions; outcome measures and their interpretation; evidence, efficacy and effectiveness; Health Technology Assessment; study design; risk and uncer- tainty; discounting; sensitivity analyses; modeling; systematic reviews and meta-analyses.
Non-health economists (henceforth referred to as ‘lay stakeholders’) are often asked to use the outputs of cost-effectiveness models to inform decisions, but they can find them difficult to understand. Conversely, health economists may have limited experience of explaining cost-effectiveness models… Read More »How to explain cost-effectiveness models for diagnostic tests to a lay audience
We’ve seen a few editorials and commentaries popping up about the EQ-5D-5L recently, in Health Economics, PharmacoEconomics, and PharmacoEconomics again. All of these articles have – to varying extents – acknowledged the need for NICE to exercise caution in the… Read More »Bad reasons not to use the EQ-5D-5L
The Irrelevance of Inference was a seminal paper published by Karl Claxton in 1999. In it he outlines a stochastic decision making approach to the evaluation of health technologies. A key point that he makes is that we need only to examine… Read More »The irrelevance of inference: (almost) 20 years on is it still irrelevant?
The world’s highest impact factor medical journal, the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), seems to have been doing some soul searching. After publishing an editorial early in 2016 insinuating that researchers requesting data from trials for re-analysis were “research parasites“,… Read More »Data sharing and the cost of error
The poor state of public economics communication has been decried in many fora. The consensus of economists regarding issues such as the impacts of austerity, leaving the European Union, and other major policy choices, is in general poorly communicated to the public. With… Read More »PrEP: A story in desperate need of health economics communication
In an ideal world new policies and interventions could be tested in a randomised fashion before implementation. But, all to often, policies within the health service are decided upon in the absence of decent evidence to serve political rather than… Read More »The NHS as policy laboratory
Today, two new studies are published examining different aspects of the observed increase in the risk of mortality associated with weekend admission, the so-called ‘weekend effect’. In the first [disclaimer: I am an author of this], the results of a… Read More »The ‘Weekend Effect’ (and what it means for research and policy)
In the last journal round up, we featured a paper that found that gains to life were valued higher than gains to consumption under standard assumptions about preferences. This sounds like one of those common sense things that are touted… Read More »Three arguments in favour of a negative social discount rate
The recently delivered Queen’s speech set out the government’s plan for “a 7-day NHS”. This vision is a reaction to alarming statistics that mortality rates are increased by 11% for patients admitted to hospital on a Saturday, and 16% if… Read More »The economics of a 7-day NHS
In a previous post I asked whether the study by Claxton et al can or should inform the cost-effectiveness threshold used by NICE. The authors argued that, “it is the expected health effects … of the average displacement within the… Read More »Identifying the effect of expenditure on health outcomes: another small comment on Claxton et al