This was my first experience of the biennial conference organised by the International Society on Priorities in Health Care. The society was founded in 1996 at the University of Birmingham in the UK and returned to its spiritual home 20… Read More »Meeting round-up: Priorities 2016
Every Monday our authors provide a round-up of some of the most recently published peer reviewed articles from the field. We don’t cover everything, or even what’s most important – just a few papers that have interested the author. Visit our Resources… Read More »Chris Sampson’s journal round-up for 1st August 2016
Every Monday our authors provide a round-up of some of the most recently published peer reviewed articles from the field. We don’t cover everything, or even what’s most important – just a few papers that have interested the author. Visit our Resources… Read More »Chris Sampson’s journal round-up for 6th June 2016
Every Monday our authors provide a round-up of some of the most recently published peer reviewed articles from the field. We don’t cover everything, or even what’s most important – just a few papers that have interested the author. Visit our Resources… Read More »Paul Mitchell’s journal round-up for 25th April 2016
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
I was recently questioned about the future of the NHS, during a live debate on the BBC Radio 4 programme Moral Maze, on 9 July 2014. One of the panelists took me to task for being a “bean counter”. I… Read More »Bean counting and the NHS
It was recently proposed that, here in the UK, foreigners should start having to pay towards their health care because of the apparent budgetary pressure from ‘health tourists’. Let’s be clear upfront; this isn’t a problem. If you believe the media, ‘health tourism’… Read More »No borders, no nations, no user charges
Personalised medicine appears to be an inevitable future of health care, and economists aren’t ready for it. It has various monikers and related concepts including precision medicine, stratified medicine, pharmacogenomics, pharmacogenetics and predictive medicine. But, whatever you call it, it means big… Read More »Economics of personalised medicine: an introduction
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
An argument that often comes up when it comes to the distribution of scarce health resources is who should receive them. Many different arguments are posed with varying degrees of sophistication. Various studies have elicited population preferences for distributing scarce… Read More »To whom the benefits?
