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