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.
The big appeal of Markov models is their relative simplicity, with their focus on what happens with a whole cohort, instead of individual patients. Because of this, they are relatively bad at taking into account patient heterogeneity (true differences in… Read More »Heterogeneity and Markov models
By Mohsen Sadatsafavi and Stirling Bryan In economic evaluation of health technologies, evidence synthesis is typically about quantification of the evidence in terms of parameters. Bootstrapping is a non-parametric inferential method in trial-based economic evaluations. On the surface the two… Read More »Bayesian evidence synthesis and bootstrapping for trial-based economic evaluations: comfortable bed fellows?
Some recent research from the Centre for Health Economics at Monash University has quantified something that we are all aware of: fudging in the measurement of health-related quality of life. They have found that, on average, randomly changing from one… Read More »The ‘Q’ in the QALY: are we fudging it?
I recently signed up for a clinical trial (www.intervalstudy.org.uk). The baseline questionnaire included the SF-36. Under normal circumstances I would be at full health for all questions but, on this occasion, I was not. If the researchers go on to… Read More »The economics of bereavement
By Chris Sampson, David Whitehurst and Andrew Street In December 2012, an article was published in The European Journal of Health Economics with the title ‘Patients whose GP knows complementary medicine tend to have lower costs and live longer’. We… Read More »Bad science in health economics: complementary medicine, costs and mortality
Economics is largely about trade-offs and compromise. Academics study the former but don’t often engage in the latter. In health economics, as in other fields, a key trade-off is between equity and efficiency. We’ve been studying this for a.very.long.time. Despite this, as… Read More »The potential of the super QALY to reconcile the key contentions in health economics
Decision models can be very useful. They can also be very bad. ISPOR and SMDM recently got together to form the Modeling Good Research Practices Task Force and have produced a set of reports. One of the reports, by David… Read More »Call for a model registry
The aim of a health intervention is generally to cause a cost-effective increase to some normative outcome such as by reducing mortality, increasing productivity and so forth. Often policy makers want to encourage or discourage certain behaviours by using incentives… Read More »Cannabis and asbestos: The cost-effectiveness of prohibition as health policy
In economic evaluations in health, time matters. More time in a bad health state is necessarily worse (or no better) than a smaller amount of time in said health state. Likewise, the value of an intervention increases with the duration… Read More »Considering time perception
Can we reasonably consider ‘doing nothing’ as an alternative course of action? In many cost-effectiveness analyses the intervention under consideration is compared against a ‘doing nothing’ scenario, although frequently the next best alternative is used. Ultimately the health technology assessment… Read More »The ethics of doing nothing