- Posted By: Virginia Chiocchia
Last week I attended the Introduction to Health Economic Evaluation course offered by the Health Economics Research Centre (HERC) of the University of Oxford.
This one-day course is designed for health researchers or anyone involved in the healthcare sector who wants to understand the basics of health economics and its relevance to the health service.
The course is divided into four sessions. The first session is an introduction to main economics concepts and health economic evaluation with a first look at the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) and the cost-effectiveness plane. The second session presents the concepts involved in measuring outcomes for the use in economic evaluation, differentiating between those used in cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA), cost-utility analysis (CUA) and cost-benefit analysis (CBA) and explaining how to construct quality adjusted life years (QALYs) and how to obtain relevant utility weights using the standard gamble, time trade-off and visual analogue scale methods. The aim of the third session is to discuss the principles in measuring costs with particular attention to the different sources of resource use and the importance of the difference perspective of study. The last session provides an understanding of reporting and interpreting cost-effectiveness results and how to use them in decision-making.
The last three sessions also include practical exercise whose purpose is to show the application of the techniques explained during the presentations.
No previous knowledge of economics is required to attend this course, which is offered regularly by HERC, usually on two different dates twice a year.
I found it very helpful and very well organised, so if you are interested in attending the next one, you can find all the info here:
http://www.herc.ox.ac.uk/courses/introcoursesummary