Dr Elisabetta De Cao COW 3.06

This course is compulsory on the Executive MSc in Evaluation of Health Care Interventions and Outcomes, in collaboration with NICE. This course is not available as an outside option.

When randomised controlled trials are not possible to conduct due to feasibility, ethical, or policy reasons, quasi-experimental study designs can be used to evaluate the causal impact of health programs and policies. The objective of this course is to teach students how to design, critically appraise, and conduct quasi-experimental studies evaluating health policies, programmes, and interventions. The main focus of the course will be on regression discontinuity designs, interrupted time-series designs, difference-in-differences designs, instrumental variable designs, and synthetic control approaches. This module will provide an overview of these study designs and outline the advantages and disadvantages of each approach with specific examples from the health care literature. Suitability of routinely available healthcare datasets for quasi-experimental evaluation studies will be discussed with seminal examples. Computer workshops will provide the students with hands-on experience in conducting quasi-experimental evaluations.

The course will be delivered in no less than 22 hours and consists lectures and seminars.

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

Student will receive detailed feedback on their project report outlines. Feedback received on the project outline will be helpful when developing the final project report. 

• Gertler, Paul J. Impact Evaluation in Practice. World Bank Publications, 2016
• Cunningham, Scott. Causal Inference: The Mixtape. Yale University Press, 2021. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1c29t27. Accessed 12 July 2021.
• William R.. Shadish, Thomas D. Cook, and Donald Thomas Campbell. Experimental and quasi-experimental designs for generalized causal inference. Wadsworth Cengage learning, 2002.
• Imbens, Guido W., and Donald B. Rubin. Causal inference in statistics, social, and biomedical sciences. Cambridge University Press, 2015.
• Bärnighausen, Till, et al. "Quasi-experimental study designs series—paper 1: introduction: two historical lineages." Journal of clinical epidemiology 89 (2017): 4-11.
• Bernal, James Lopez, Steven Cummins, and Antonio Gasparrini. "Interrupted time series regression for the evaluation of public health interventions: a tutorial." International journal of epidemiology 46.1 (2017): 348-355.
• O’Keeffe, Aidan G., et al. "Regression discontinuity designs: an approach to the evaluation of treatment efficacy in primary care using observational data." Bmj 349 (2014): g5293.
• Kreif, Noémi, et al. "Examination of the synthetic control method for evaluating health policies with multiple treated units." Health economics 25.12 (2016): 1514-1528.

Project (100%, 2500 words) post-summer term.