HEVAL5200 – Topics in economic evaluation

Course content

The course aims to give you basic fundamental knowledge, both theoretically and practically about how to perform economic evaluation alongside a clinical trial. The course will follow the pathway from designing the trial, through data collection till data analysis and publication. The course will combine lectures with case studies running data analysis of data from real trials.

Learning outcome

Knowledge

You will gain knowledge of:

• How to design a publishable economic evaluation alongside a clinical trial
• When an economic evaluation is not appropriate in a clinical trial
• How to price medical services using both a health care and a societal perspective
• When and how to measure health effects, with a focus on quality adjusted life years (QALYs). Also, how to calculate area beneath the curve (going from health related quality of life to QALYs.
• How to analyse differences in cost and effects, both when data are complete and when there are a lot of missing or censored data.
• How to calculate and present the cost effectiveness ratio
• Understanding sampling uncertainty

Skills

You will learn how to:

• Practically collect and gather data on costs and effects (choose outcome variables including utility instruments, design registration forms for cost data)
• Organize a database to run a cost-effectiveness analysis
• Perform statistical analysis on individual level data that are relevant for evaluating cost effectiveness (imputation for missing data, survival analysis, cost functions and bootstrap)
• Present the results in an article
• Use software, such as Excel and STATA

General competence

You will be able to:

• Understand the structure and work related to clinical trials
• Perform an economic evaluation in a clinical trial
• Critically read and interpret economic evaluations performed alongside clinical trial
• Reflect on how decisions are made based partially on economic evaluations performed in clinical trials

Admission to the course

This course is only available for students at the following master programmes:

Health Economics, Policy and Management (master's two years)

European Master in Health Economics and Management (master's two years)

Students who are admitted to study programmes at UiO must each semester register which courses and exams they wish to sign up for in Studentweb.

If you are not already enrolled as a student at UiO, please see our information about admission requirements and procedures.

Teaching

Lectures and seminars.

Mandatory assignments.

Examination

Home examination and oral presentation. 

Examination and grading at The Faculty of Medicine.

Language of examination

For students at Eu-HEM: English

For students at HEPAM: The examination set will be given in English. Answers can be given in Norwegian, Swedish, Danish or in English.

Grading scale

Grades are awarded on a scale from A to F, where A is the best grade and F is a fail. Read more about the grading system.

Resit an examination

For Eu-HEM students:

An EU-hem student cannot present her or himself for the examination in a course more than two times. There will be held re-sits for EU-hem students who have failed an exam or who have legitimate absence (usually illness) in January and August. If you are entitled to a re-sit you must contact the student advisor via email no longer than one week after the result of the exam has been published.

More about examinations at UiO

• Use of sources and citations
• Special exam arrangements due to individual needs
• Withdrawal from an exam
• Illness at exams / postponed exams
• Explanation of grades and appeals
• Resitting an exam
• Cheating/attempted cheating

You will find further guides and resources at the web page on examinations at UiO.