Statistical modelling for health economics

Rachel Oughton

Health economics is essentially about maximising the amount of health gained within a given budget.

Given a range of different interventions, treatments, surgical procedures, vaccine programmes and so on, how do we decide which combination of options will be the most beneficial overall?

Example
The cost-effectiveness plane, a well-used type of plot in health economics.

A big issue in health economics is the amount of uncertainty inherent in making healthcare decisions for a population.

Economic evaluation in healthcare therefore involves the use of many different statistical and mathematical models, to cater for the huge variety of scenarios. If you'd like to read about some of these, some examples are given below.

Example
A schematic diagram of a Markov Model, a model often used to model the progression of non-communicable diseases within a particular cohort.

This project offers a huge amount of freedom, to explore whichever area of health economic modelling most interests you, or to focus on a particular methodology. It is likely to involve some programming in implementing models, and is also likely to be based on journal articles more than textbooks.

Prerequisites/Corequisites

None