Health economics in R: Scoping workshop
Venue:
Seminar and Learning Centre 5.06 (SALC 6), Sherfield Building, South Kensington Campus, Imperial College London, SW7 2BX
Date & Time:
Friday 30th November 2018, 9am - 5pm
Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe - Abraham Lincoln
Background
The evaluation of the societal value of interventions in health are informed by health economics but the most commonly used computational tools, often packages interacting with Excel, are limited in their ability to analyse increasingly large and complex data sets (e.g. in precision medicine or using “Big Data”) in short time-frames (e.g. for emergency preparedness and response), and especially in the context of infectious disease modelling and associated probabilistic sensitivity analyses.
Aims
Our goal is to develop useful, novel, user-friendly analysis tools for widespread adoption to enable better-informed, rapid decision making by health economists, practitioners and others using widely available software.
Format
A day workshop will be held at Imperial College London to scope and plan addressing current gaps, limitations and opportunities in the software commonly used for health economics methodologies. Through semi-structured discussions we will map future requirements for conducting economic evaluations using the statistical software language R. Workshop attendees are invited from a range of areas to bring differing health economics problems and experience.
Outcomes
The workshop will identify and clarify:
- What is the demand for these tools and by whom?
- What are the issues with current software?
- What can and should the new tools do better?
The workshop will kick start prototypes of functions, data and packages to be released publicly (e.g. CRAN). It will also provide a networking forum, knowledge and skill sharing, as well as potential training courses in using the new tools and papers.
If you would like to attend or have any questions please contact ngreen1@ic.ac.uk.
Generally, the morning will consist of setting the scene presentations. The afternoon will focus on what we would like to achieve and how.
Final program
9:00-9:30 Registration with coffee
9:30-10:00 Welcome & introductions [Nathan Green, Imperial College London]
10:00-11:00 Background & aims
11:00 Break
11:30-12:30 General overview of current tools for health economics
11:30-11:50 TreeAge [Nathan Green]
11:50-12:10 Microsoft Excel [Nathan Green]
12:10-12:30 R (and RStudio) [Lazaro Mwandigha]
12:30-1:30 Lunch
1:30-2:00 Case studies using R for Health Technology Assessments (HTA) [Gianluca Baio, UCL]
2:00-2:30 Identify health economic modelling needs & challenges
2:30-3:00 Group needs and prioritise
3:00-3:30 Break
3:30-4:15 Identify possible opportunities & solutions
4:15-5:00 Next steps/roadmap/wrap-up
5:00 Close
Location
The event is at the South Kensington Campus. Directions and travel options can be found here. On campus, we’ll be in the Seminar and Learning Centre (SALC), which is on level 5 of the Sherfield Building; Number 20 on this map. The entrance to the Sherfield Building is open to the public so you shouldn’t have any problems getting to the room. Just take the lifts on the right hand side.