For my second contribution to the blog, I will provide a short review of the March 2024 issue of PharmacoEconomics. There are 8 articles in this issue covering a range of topics, including articles about stakeholder involvement in economic model development, improving health disparity evidence gaps in value assessment, using generalised linear models to estimate costs, informing value-based contracts for cell and gene therapies using real-world data, a modelling study examining the impact of common pathogens in the United States, two systematic reviews, and a report providing recommendations o ..read more

NB: spoiler alert! There are many interpretations of the meaning, themes, and philosophical explorations of the film Blade Runner. A neglected reading is that it analyses in science fiction form the EQ-5D. It investigates its rationale, aims, and even methods for valuing health states. If you are a member of the EuroQol group, this will be obvious, but if not you may ask “What’s that going to prove?”. Indulge me. Analysing QALYs: years in pain Some way through the film, Dr Eldon Tyrell explains QALYs to Roy Batty with a neat analogy: “The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long”. B ..read more

The 2023 International Health Economics Association (IHEA, formerly stylised as iHEA) Congress was held in Cape Town, South Africa, in collaboration with the African Health Economics and Policy Association (AfHEA). The Mother City of the Rainbow Nation, home of Table Mountain, the African Cape Penguin, and the most biodiverse city in the world. This was an IHEA of many firsts; the first IHEA held in Africa, the first IHEA held in a low or middle income country (LMIC), the first in-person AfHEA event, and my first IHEA too! As with previous meetings for HESG and EuHEA, I created a vlog for the ..read more

Chris and I differ in several ways. For starters, I still eat cheese. And, to misquote the late Charlton Heston, you can pry it from my cold, dead hands. I will also continue to peer review pre-publication manuscripts, although my defence of doing so won’t be as vehement as for dairy product consumption. To begin by setting out my reviewing experience, I’ve done probably around 50 reviews for 15-20 different journals. I don’t have much experience of sitting on an editorial board, having joined The Patient’s recently enough not to regret it yet. My approach is to be fair and constructive, and m ..read more

A few weeks ago* I headed to Rome for the EuroQol plenary meeting. I arrived at the hotel around 06:30 a.m. off the back of a 36-hour train adventure and soon got to the usual routine of catching up with old friends and discussing all things EQ-5D (et al.). Plenary meetings include numerous strategic discussions and business matters for EuroQol members to tackle. I’ll spare you those and focus on the scientific programme that ran over two days on the 20th and 21st of September. EuroQol plenary meetings employ an HESG-style discussant model with full papers shared in advance, but with shorter s ..read more

This issue of AHEHP poked some random vertebrae along the backbone of my career history, including digital health, screening, cost-effectiveness thresholds, and principles relating to decision modelling. Starting with the zeitgeist, digital health. This issue includes a report from a team involved in a NICE Medical Technology Guidance for a digital technology. Since my work on Sleepio, I’ve been absorbed in the difficulty of evaluating digital health technologies and providing access to them in the NHS. The technology in question for this study is myCOPD, which is an app-based technology to su ..read more

Cognitive dissonance is part of the human condition. I used to eat cheese. But we can do better if we try. I don’t eat cheese anymore, and I won’t engage in pre-publication peer review. I quit. On numerous occasions, I’ve written about my dislike of pre-publication peer review. It doesn’t work. And yet, I have promoted platforms that support the system, such as Publons. I even joined the editorial board of PharmacoEconomics – Open, and I quite recently became an Associate Editor for Frontiers in Health Services, journals that rely on pre-publication peer review. I’ve tried to be a good and fai ..read more

For our first ever HESG we had the privilege of visiting a (very) sunny Keble College, Oxford. Beautiful classical architecture with verdant green quads, a setting akin to Hogwarts, where health economics is the star of the show… What’s not to love?! Harry Potter vibez for our conference dinner @HERC_Oxford #HESG2023 pic.twitter.com/QU5QW6xrG2 — HESG (@UK_HESG) June 22, 2023 Day 1 started with an interesting double session on the importance of communicating the results of research. Discussions ensued on balancing getting research into the public domain and influencing the policy debate with e ..read more

For a decade, science has faced a replication crisis in that the results of many important studies are difficult or impossible to reproduce. For example, the Open Science Collaboration in 2015 published a paper replicating 100 psychology studies that found that many replications produced weaker evidence for the original findings. A study published in Science reproducing 18 economic experiments soon followed and again found that up to one-third could not be reproduced. The question remains whether health economics faces a reproducibility crisis and, if so, what do we do about it? To fully under ..read more

Our authors provide regular round-ups of the latest peer-reviewed journals. We cover all issues of major health economics journals as well as other notable releases. Visit our journal round-up log to see past editions organised by publication title. If you’d like to write a journal round-up, get in touch. Perhaps you’ve heard of the PECUNIA project. I’ve been a fan on the sidelines. The PECUNIA researchers embraced the often-neglected task of doing a good job of resource use measurement. The first paper in this issue of AHEHP describes the development of a new resource use measure (RUM) that f ..read more