THE BASICS OF ESTIMATION AND UNCERTAINTY IN COST-EFFECTIVENESS ANALYSIS

Course size limit: none Level: Intermediate Background: Many funding agencies and academic publications now require cost-effectiveness estimates and measures of uncertainty around those estimates. This course will introduce the concepts behind probabilistic sensitivity analysis and net benefit regression and provide participants with practical skills to produce numeric and graphical outputs that reflect estimates and their uncertainty. This course is directed towards health outcomes researchers in academia, industry, government or regulatory bodies without special training in health economics. Participants will be expected to know how to perform simple regeression analysis. Objectives and Course Description: This course will provide participants with the conceptual background to understand why it is important to produce cost-effectiveness estimates and measure their uncertainty and will present some commonly used methods to do this. Specific objectives are:

1. To understand the conceptual basis for measuring uncertainty in costs, effects, and cost-effectiveness estimates.
2. To understand the relationship between the scatter plot of incremental costs and incremental effects and how these relate to confidence ellipses and cost-effectiveness acceptability curves
3. To be able to build confidence ellipses and cost-effectiveness acceptability curves using Excel or Stata
4. To understand how regression analysis can be used to estimate cost-effectiveness in person-level data using the net benefit approach.
5. To understand how regression analysis can be used to characterize uncertainty in person-level data using the net benefit approach.
6. To understand the strengths and weaknesses of alternative methods for presenting uncertainty in cost-effectiveness analyses.

Format, Requirements, Target Audience: The course will consist of didactic learning (theory bursts) followed by interactive tutorials ("hands on" exercise). Participants are required to bring their own laptops loaded with either Excel or Stata. Using guidance and data files provided by the instructors, each participant will learn to generate cost-effectiveness acceptability curves (CEACs) and confidence ellipses in Excel and Stata.