Cost Effectiveness and Decision Making for Health Care

This course offers an introduction to economic evaluation, with a focus on cost-effectiveness analysis, to guide decision-making in healthcare services. Students will gain foundational knowledge in economic concepts and learn how to apply these principles to evaluate the costs and health benefits of various healthcare programs. The curriculum covers multiple types of economic evaluations, emphasizing Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALYs) as a key outcome measure for benefits. Additionally, the course will explore the use of decision trees and Markov models, providing insights on how to interpret the results of cost-effectiveness studies effectively.

• Introduction to Economic Evaluation for Health Care
• In this module, you will be introduced to the foundational concepts of economic evaluation in health care. We will cover the essential background, key concepts, and definitions that will set the stage for the analytical methods you will learn in the next modules.
• Costing Methods and Quality Adjusted Life Year (QALY)
• We cover the basics of costing methods used for economic evaluation and introduce the concept of the Quality Adjusted Life Year; the main outcome measure used for cost-effectiveness studies.
• Interpreting the Findings
• We show how the results of cost-effectiveness studies should be interpreted for decision making. This will enable you to read and understand a published cost-effectiveness paper.
• Building Models for Cost-Effectiveness
• We cover modelling in generals as a way of thinking and then teach two commonly used methods ‘Decision Trees’ and ‘Markov Models’