The BCEA Supremacy

If you’re reading this, you may think that I’ve not really done anything else than being on the blog today. That is not entirely true and between bouts of blogging I have actually done some work.

One of the things I’ve accomplished today is to finish (surprisingly early!) my presentation for Friday’s talk at the European Conference on Health Economics, in Zurich.

Up until now, my only contacts with Zurich have been through Jason Bourne. Digression alert (1): I’ve read the book after I watched the movie. This is quite boorish of me (you know what I mean if you’ve watched this \(-\) and if you haven’t, then you should!). Digression alert (2): as it turns out, there are several factual errors in the movie, many of which in the part set in Zurich; for example, there’s a long scene in the “US Embassy”, which in fact doesn’t exist, given that the Swiss capital is Bern.

So, all in all, I don’t really know anything about Zurich. I hear it’s nice, but my prior is really flat and I’ll check it out, albeit quickly.

I will talk about BCEA (which I’ve already discussed also here). The slides I have prepared are here. There isn’t much time (only 12 minutes plus discussion), so I’ll have to rush through some of them, but I think that should be enough to at least give a very quick idea of what the package can do.

The point I’ll try to stress is that it is not able to produce or run the analysis model, but only helps in post-processing the output. It would be cool if it became the de facto standard for this kind of analyses (that’s why I’m unashamedly pushing it so much, including in the book).