Today sees the publication of surgeons’ death rates on the MyNHS website (see Guardian and BBC stories). The website presents full lists of surgeons by specialty alongside either blue circles with a large ‘OK’ inside, grey circles with question marks, or… Read More »Is there any use in publishing surgeons’ death rates?
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?
At the beginning of my PhD I was quite stuck to find good data. I wanted data with good measures of mental health, physical health, employment, income, small area indicators and standard controls like age, gender, education and so on.… Read More »Longitudinal datasets of potential interest to health economists
Economists need data. In this post I want to introduce those of you who don’t know it to a magnificent data source – quandl.com. Quandl is an open source website that indexes a huge range of data – over 6,000,000… Read More »Data everywhere! – Introduction to Quandl
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
Empirical research into health and health related outcomes is characterised by a predominance of binary outcomes. One of the most popular outcomes (in a statistical sense) is mortality, for example. This type of outcome warrants its own type of model… Read More »To ‘y’ or not to ‘y’: Dichotomous outcomes and endogenous regressors
Simulation and data analysis are two of the principle parts of health economics research. Most Master’s courses teach both, although many focus more heavily on the former. There are many programs and packages available to a researcher, each with their… Read More »Tools of the trade
Ben Goldacre, author of Bad Science, recently published an article online for his Guardian column discussing hospital level variation in Bowel Cancer mortality. In this article he discusses how journalists often see patterns in random variation, to which he responds… Read More »Cause and effect: Hospital choice and rankings
