Professor Michael Drummond

This course is compulsory on the Executive MSc in Health Economics, Outcomes and Management in Cardiovascular Sciences. This course is not available as an outside option.

Health care decision makers are often faced with the challenges of resource allocation. Economic evaluation is used to formalize the process of decision-making on the basis of costs and benefits associated with multiple alternative scenarios or interventions. Decision makers use evidence from economic evaluation analyses to make specific recommendations for coverage, reimbursement, and pricing decisions for a variety of health care interventions, as well as define best practices. This course will enable students to understand and apply analytic methods in the economic evaluation of health interventions and provide a strong foundation in the several advanced concepts in economic evaluation, and in particular cost-effectiveness of interventions used in long-term chronic illnesses. The course will provide an overview of the principles and practices of measuring and analyzing costs; and estimating effectiveness in terms of quality-adjusted life years and disability-adjusted life years. Practical topics will include the design and implementation of economic evaluation models and the role of clinical data inputs to inform economic evaluation analyses.

10 hours of lectures, 10 hours of seminars and 5 hours of computer workshops in the MT.

Students will be expected to produce 1 piece of coursework in the ST.

Drummond M et al. Methods for the Economic Evaluation of Health Care Programmes. Oxford, OUP, 2005

Drummond M et al. Economic Evaluation in Health Care: Merging Theory with Practice, Oxford, OUP, 2002.

Gray A. Applied Methods of Cost-effectiveness Analysis in Healthcare (Handbooks in Health Economic Evaluation), Oxford, OUP, 2011.

Weinstein MC et al. Foundations of cost-effectiveness analysis for health and medical practices. N Eng J Med. 1977; 296 (13):716–21.

Russell LB et al. The role of cost-effectiveness analysis in health and medicine. JAMA. 1996; 276 (14): 1172–77.

Research project (100%) post-summer term.