HEDS is part of the School of Health and Related Research (ScHARR) at the University of Sheffield. We undertake research, teaching, training and consultancy on all aspects of health related decision science, with a particular emphasis on health economics, HTA and evidence synthesis.

Thursday 1 May 2014

Cost-effectiveness modelling using patient-level simulation…

…a Technical Support Document (TSD) from the NICE Decision Support Unit.  The aims of this TSD are to:

  • Increase awareness of patient-level modelling approaches and highlight the key differences between patient-level and cohort-level modelling approaches.
  • Provide guidance on situations in which patient-level modelling approaches may be preferable to cohort-level modelling approaches.
  • Provide a description of how to implement a patient-level simulation using either a patient-level state-transition or discrete event simulation (DES) framework in a variety of software environments (Microsoft Excel®, R, TreeAge Pro®).
  • Provide example models illustrating how to implement a simple cost-effectiveness model using a patient-level approach. The example models cover both DES (R, Visual Basic module within Microsoft Excel®, TreeAge Pro®) and patient-level state-transition (Microsoft Excel® and TreeAge Pro®) frameworks.
  • Provide guidance on good practice when developing and reporting a patient-level simulation to inform a NICE TA.

The focus of this document is on the application of patient-level simulation to systems where patients can be assumed to be independent as systems incorporating patient interaction are not a common feature with Technology Appraisal.

Details of this guidance are available here.  The other TSDs, covering evidence synthesis, utilities, reviewing model parameters and survival analysis are available here.  TSDs on treatment switching and observational data will be available shortly.