Syllabus

The primary learning objectives of the course are:

  • Understand the rationale and methods for conducting economic evaluations of global health interventions;
  • Critically evaluate published papers in the field of global health economic evaluation;
  • Identify sources for model parameters including costs and epidemiologic data;
  • Understand the theoretical rationale for disability adjusted life years (DALYs) and willingness-to-pay thresholds; and
  • Participate in the design and conduct of health economic evaluations in collaboration with health economists or mathematical modelers.

You will meet the objectives listed above through a combination of the following activities in this course:

  • Listening to online lectures
  • Completing the required and suggested readings
  • Completing the course project
  • Participating in discussion forms
  • Module 1: Introduction and rationale for economic evaluations for health interventions
    • Understand the rationale for conducting economic evaluations of global health interventions;
    • Understand the theoretical foundation for economic evaluations, including cost effectiveness analyses;
    • Describe the economic impact of colonialism on the willingness to pay for global health interventions.
  • Module 2: Methods for conducting economic evaluations
    • Explain the different types of economic evaluations;
    • Define economic concepts including opportunity cost and discounting;
    • Interpret an incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER);
    • Understand the theoretical foundation and current debate around willingness to pay thresholds; and
    • Understand standard guidelines for reporting economic evaluations in the published literature.
  • Module 3: The Numerator: Identifying and measuring costs for economic evaluations
    • Understand how to identify and value costs for economic evaluations;
    • Define different methods of cost data collection (e.g., gross vs microcosting); and
    • Explain how time costs are collected through time and motion observation.
  • Module 4: Examples of costing analyses in global health
  • Module 5: The Denominator: Estimating health benefits for economic evaluations
    • Understand how utility and disability estimates are calculated for QALY and DALY estimation
  • Module 6: Decision analysis and introduction to modeling (open-source models)
    • Understand the role of modeling in economic evaluations;
    • Define decision analytic modeling and understand published literature that uses this method; and
    • Explain the steps of building a decision tree and calculating expected value.
  • Module 7: Markov and Microsimulation Models
    • Define and understand the role of Markov modeling in economic evaluations; and
    • Understand the rationale and methodology for conducting sensitivity analyses.
  • Module 8: Dynamic Models (Finding model inputs from the literature/other sources, adapting RCT data for models Geospatial modeling)
    • Understand the structure of individual-based and dynamic models and explain the benefits of using these models for economic evaluations;
    • Explain how to find and adapt data from the published literature for model inputs; and
    • Understand the rationale and methodology for conducting budget impact analyses.
  • Module 9: Guidelines for reporting health economic evaluations and special topics
  • Module 10: Budget Impact Analysis
    • Budget impact analysis
    • Understand the rationale and methodology for conducting budget impact analyses