Wash-up: Health economics in R scoping workshop
It has taken me much longer than I’d planned to write this post but I think I can just about blame it on the Christmas period. It was great to meet others with a keen interest in this initiative on the 30th November at Imperial College. You can see previous post for more details. The slides from the day are available here.
Overview
In short, the aims of the day were to expore, from the ground up, what tools would be best developed in R for doing health economic analyses by asking
- 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?
This was all with the ultimate aim to kick start prototypes of functions, data and packages to be released publicly. It also provided a networking forum, knowledge and skill sharing, as well as potential training courses in using the new tools and papers.
Following the workshop I’ve put together the following resources:
- GitHub Site - I’ve names this Health Economics in R for Modelling and Evaluations Studies (HERMES) since it has a medical association and comes with a ready-made logo (above).
- GitHub Organisation - A central place to collaboratively develop R tools.
- Package ideas - This is a direct outcome of the workshop. using GitHub Issues we can record, tag and discuss idea for new R code. This is much more powerful than a simple todo list and there are 3rd party tools that plug into this which extend its functionality even more. Here’s what I included as a result of discussions on the 30th:
