Methodology in Health Economic Evaluation

The aim of this course is to introduce economic evaluation methodology and practice to persons unfamiliar with economic thinking in a healthcare and prevention context. Participants will be introduced to the main approaches to economic evaluation, the measurement of costs and effects, including quality of life measurements, economic modeling, and uncertainty analyses. Participants will also learn to assess economic evaluations as published in the literature.

The course topics will be covered in interactive lectures, case studies and group discussions. In addition, aspects of economic modeling will be covered extensively with computer exercises, in which participants will learn how to develop basic and advanced cost-effectiveness models. Lectures and computer exercises will be given by staff from the Health Technology Assessment group of the Julius Center/UMC Utrecht.

Our courses are aimed at clinical researchers, nurses, general practitioners, and other health professionals who want to improve their skills in epidemiology, statistics and (clinical) research.

At the end of the course the participants should:

• be able to understand the key concepts of economic evaluation methodology
• be able to design an economic evaluation study in which cost and effect measurements are incorporated
• be able to critically assess published economic evaluations have knowledge about decision-analytical Markov models with and without time-dependent probabilities and about probabilistic Markov models and the assessment of uncertainty by means of Monte Carlo simulation
• be able to understand and assess the presentation of results from economic evaluations

1 week, fulltime