Decision makers have been faced with challenges to meet the increasing demand for health care services. Economic evaluation has been widely used to inform health policy decision makers in the process of seeking an efficient way to allocate scarce health care resources. Decision modelling plays a pivotal role in health economic evaluation as it allows extrapolation of health outcomes and costs beyond the trial periods, prediction of final endpoints based on intermediate outcomes, synthesis of evidence from different sources, generalisation of the results from clinical trials, evaluation of uncertainties, and generation of information about which health interventions represent value for money. This session welcomes submissions from a wide range of modelling studies and development of software tools for prediction of health outcomes as well as health care costs to support economic evaluation. Models that can be used to simulate disease progression and/or predict serious health-related events over a long time period in people with ill health, and those to predict transmission of infectious diseases and assess the impact of interventions on health and economic burden are of special interest. Examples of model types include state-transition models, discrete-event simulation, probabilistic discrete-time simulation, system dynamics and agent-based modelling.
We encourage submissions of studies involving development of new modelling methods or use of modern techniques to increase accuracy of the predictions or to address complex issues in decision making. Examples of such methods include the use of big data and machine learning or Bayesian approach in the simulations and development of new metrics for calibration of existing models. Other areas of interest include methods to reduce computational burden in patient-level or microsimulation models and translation of simulated results into practice.
Key topics: Modelling health outcomes in non-communicable diseases, Modelling transmission of communicable diseases, Advanced methods in health economic modelling, Calibration and parameterisation of health economics models