The course aims to introduce to students the main principles, methods, measures, and insights of behavioural sciences, and the key state-of-the-art applications to health economics, policy, practice, and management. The course is designed to enhance students’ abilities to apply rigorously and critically behavioural science tools to concrete challenges in the health and healthcare area. It covers principles of behavioural science; heterogeneity and behavioural economics; behavioural health economics and policy; methods of behavioural science; behavioural experiments in health (field, lab, lab-field, online, mobile); behavioural data linking; measures of behavioural science; risk preferences and health; time preferences and health; social preferences and health; behavioural insights for information policies in health; financial and non-financial incentives in health; behaviourally supercharged incentives in health; nudging behavioural change in health; behavioural spillovers in health; behavioural insights for regulation and taxation in health, healthcare, and risky health behaviours; behavioural insights for healthy behaviours (diet and nutrition, physical exercise, alcohol abuse, tobacco and drug use, medication, screening, infectious diseases, vaccination); behavioural insights for blood and organ donations; behavioural insights for health practice, management, and policy challenges.
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.
The course will cover: international comparisons of health care expenditure, health care insurance, contract theory applied to the health care sector (including principal-agent theory and incentive payment mechanisms), equity in health care, health behaviour and an introduction to econometric analysis applied to health care data.
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Systematic review and meta-analysis methods are increasingly used to evaluate the relative benefits and harms of healthcare interventions. A broad range of decision making bodies across the health care sector (including health technology assessment bodies, drug and medical device licensing agencies, biopharmaceutical industry, and hospitals) need experts equipped with the methods of reviewing and synthesizing the existing body of evidence.
This course will be focused on the principles of reviewing and synthesizing the existing body of literature. The course will first provide the rationale for adopting a systematic approach for evidence review and synthesis. It will then equip students with the methods to undertake risk of bias assessments of individual randomized controlled trials and also collections of randomized controlled trials. In addition to providing an overview of methods for quantitatively synthesizing multiple randomized controlled trials in meta-analysis, the course will present the opportunities and challenges of using evidence for decision-making in health care.
This course will cover the following topics:
Distinction between health and health care - Nature of health care as an economic commodity - How markets and insurance markets work, and how they can fail for health care and health insurance - Incentive mechanisms and principal-agent relationships in health care - Yardstick competition and Diagnostic Related Group payment schemes - Labour markets in health care - Economic evaluation as a regulatory tool
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This course develops the statistical and modelling techniques necessary to apply economic evaluation to the health care sector.
Introduction to statistical methods, linear regression analysis, logistic regression analysis, survival analysis for health outcomes, survival analysis for treatment costs, economic evaluation and clinical trials. Estimation of confidence intervals for cost-effectiveness ratios. Transformation of ratios - net benefit approach. Missing data, parametric and non-parametric approaches. Presentation of analysis, acceptability curves.
The objective of this course is to teach students how to design, critically appraise, and analyse research studies evaluating policies, programmes, and interventions.
This course will provide an overview of the principles and models of evaluation, and the role of theories, concepts, and hypotheses. In terms of research design, it will cover study design choices in light of bias, validity and other design trade-offs. The core of the course will focus on experimental, quasi-experimental, non-experimental, and qualitative designs for evaluating health interventions, programmes and policies aimed at achieving high quality care, reducing costs, and improving health outcomes. Data and measurement considerations for both quantitative and qualitative studies will be discussed alongside the importance of using mixed-methods and triangulation for interpreting findings and taking a critical approach to the results of evaluation.
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Health Technology Assessment a multidisciplinary process that summarises information about the medical, social, economic, and ethical issues related to the use of a health technology in a systematic, transparent, unbiased, and robust manner. Health Technology Assessment differs in its governance, data and evidence requirements, assessment methods, and operational arrangements across different settings and contexts. This course is aimed at introducing the key principles of Health Technology Assessment, its operational modalities, the different models of value assessment and how they link to decision-making.
The course aims to introduce students to the main principles of management and strategy and related issues that impact on organisational change, group decision making, innovation and leadership. Key models and academic tools will be presented and their application to real world situations discussed. The course aims to give students a strong academic understanding and also enable them to apply this knowledge to their practice.
Against a backdrop of great technological advances and delivery system innovations, healthcare systems are facing daunting challenges. Over the past half-century, research on cardiovascular diseases has manifested remarkable advances in the prevention and treatment of cardiovascular diseases. Yet, great challenges remain, primarily due to a lack of strong research evidence about how best to improve the quality, outcomes, and efficiency in health systems with a focus on cardiovascular diseases. Outcomes research aims to produce such evidence.
In addition to briefly reviewing key epidemiological trends in cardiovascular diseases in Europe and globally, this course will introduce key 'evidence-practice' gaps in cardiovascular diseases. The first part of the course provides an overview of the definition of quality, its key components, and its measurement in different health care systems. The second part offers a critical perspective on the literature evaluating quality improvement interventions focused on the cardiovascular disease field. The third part focuses on the basics of study design for evaluating quality improvement interventions, programmes, and policies, distinguishing between strong and weak research designs.
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The course will serve as an introduction to major issues in the economics of health and health care. It will provide participants with a strong understanding of the role economics can play in health policy and health system administration. It will provide a framework with which to understand the demands placed on the health care system, the changing nature of health care supply and delivery, the interactions between patients and providers of health care, and the performance and productivity of the health system. Participants will also be introduced to essential statistical concepts in the evaluation of clinical interventions. Seminar sessions will focus on current policy debates in health care drawing on the theory and evidence from the lectures, augmented by readings from both academic and popular sources.
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A large amount of medical research is conducted, with variable quality. Also, health claims are frequently reported in the media, and it can be difficult to determine which is based on reliable evidence and which is not. It is therefore essential to be able to interpret study results and conclusions appropriately, in order to change clinical practice or develop public health policy. This is achieved by Evidence-Based Medicine. The module will enable students to evaluate risk factors for disease or early death, and methods of disease prevention or treatment.
This course aims to present a framework to discuss the opportunities and challenges with performance measurement in health care, examine the various dimensions and levels of health system performance, identify the measurement instruments and analytic tools needed, and examine the implications of these issues for policy makers and regulators. Lectures generally focus on measuring health system performance in high-income countries but draw on the experience of other countries where relevant.
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The aim of this course it to introduce students to the economics of pharmaceutical markets and related policies that affect national and international markets broadly.
- To provide students with an understanding of basic features of pharmaceutical markets and how pharmaceutical markets work and how competition manifests itself in different parts of pharmaceutical markets.
- To illustrate to students how the pharmaceutical market is linked to the health care market, why it is often the focus of much regulation, and to help students understand the multidimensional goals of pharmaceutical policies.
- To introduce students to the economic and policy problems encountered in managing pharmaceutical markets and how to evaluate the impact of alternative policy approaches. The course will also give students some experience in critically evaluating the impact of policy on market outcomes.
- To facilitate consideration of various country-specific political, cultural and economic factors that may drive governments' approaches to pharmaceutical regulation. In this context, this course will help students consider the extent to which policies may be transferable.
- To enable students to analyse pharmaceutical markets from the perspectives of several main actors: governments, third party payers, the pharmaceutical industry, doctors, patients, pharmacists and wholesalers. Literature from Health Economics, Industrial Organisation and Health Policy will be incorporated into lectures, discussions and seminars.
- To introduce students to the economics of pricing and reimbursing pharmaceutical products, to explore different models of pricing and reimbursing medicines in OECD countries, including rate of return regulation, value-based pricing, cost-plus pricing, external price referencing and internal reference pricing, among others.
This course is intended to provide the student an orientation and overview on managing organisations within health systems. The governance, execution, information management, quality of care, and sustaining human resources will be discussed, including an examination of the uses of accounting and other forms of reporting to manage health services. This is an introductory course, appropriate for students with no formal inpatient health care management experience. The teaching delivery will be case-based learning, with the critical examination of real-world case studies and examples from across the health sector.
The course will cover the following topics: principle responsibilities of a health care system and organisations within the system; issues and strategies for enabling health care organisations to be responsive to their environment; concepts for supporting and implementing governance decisions; strategies for performance measurement and information, and analytical activities related to planning, finance, and information needs; characteristics and development of systems to assure quality of clinical services.
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