Health Economics

Objective

The objective is to 1) supervise clinical PhD students in conducting economic evaluation and 2) conduct methodological research of particular value to the field of spine diseases.

Methods

Economic analysis will be appended the analysis of clinical efficacy of RCTs. This requires an assessment of cost differences and outcome differences, respectively, between randomisation groups. The assessment of cost differences is typically based on ad hoc estimates for the (experimental) interventions, patients’ out-of-pocket costs and the society’s production loss whereas register data can be used for estimating other health care utilisation. The assessment of outcomes is typically based on the application of a generic health-related quality of life instrument (e.g. the EQ-5D), adaptation of validated clinical scores (e.g. Oswestry Disability Index) or one-dimensional measures (e.g. return-to-work).

Appending economic analysis requires no extra ethical approval (on top of that covering the respective trial conduction) and neither does it require extra approval from the Danish Data Protection Agency (on top of that already covering the collection of person data of the clinical trial). The overall methodology for economic evaluations represent state-of-the-art methodology as described in many textbooks (see e.g. Drummond et al. Methods for the Economic Evaluation of Health Care Programmes. Oxford University Press. 3rd ed. 2005).

The health economic methodological research will be conducted using ad hoc methodology depending on the specific focus. The overall focus will be on the valuation of individuals’ time, valuation of production loss and on preference measurement where no trial baseline measures are available (trauma, cancer etc.).

Human Resources and Funding

Principal Investigator (PI) Rikke Søgaard, Assistant Professor, MSc, MPH, PhD (ris@cast.sdu.dk) funded three months per year by the Strategic Research Council

Co-PI Jens Olsen, Senior Consultant, MSc (jeo@cast.sdu.dk) funded one month per year by the Strategic Research Council

PhD Student Mirja Elisabeth Kløjgaard, MSc (from January 2010) funded three years by the Strategic Research Council

Member of Strategic Management Board Jan Sørensen, Professor, MSc (jas@cast.sdu.dk) funded one month per year by CAST, University of Southern Denmark

Collaboration/interaction

This work package is closely related with all other work packages due to the function of supervising the economic evaluations. International advisors from Leiden University in the Netherlands are Senior Researchers Wilbert B van den Hout and M Elske van den Asker-van Marle. Internal collaborators at the University of Southern Denmark relating to methodological research.