Have I thought this through?
Of the many phrases and idioms in the English language, I think “have you thought this through” is one of my favourites — perhaps it’s the allitteration or that, if you’re not a native English speaker, you kind of have to concentrate to say it properly, with all the “h” sounds… And I often find myself wondering whether I’ve actually thought things through. Although, technically, that’s supposed to be my job — thinking things through and using (rigorously Bayesian) decision theory to make decisions…
Anyway: the last instance of me jumping on something with over-excitement (and, more dangerously, clouding the judgement of friends and colleagues with said over-excitement) is the new book that Howard, Petros and I have decided to edit (I’ve already talked about it here). All jokes aside, I am very excited about this — the book title is “Cost-effectiveness analysis in health economic evaluation using R” and we have agreed terms with CRC Taylor & Francis. I’m really happy about this, for several reasons: firstly, I’ve worked with them on two other books (BMHE and our latest — which is not out yet, but will be soon!) and in both occasions have thoroughly enjoyed the interaction; secondly, and most importantly, because we’ve agreed terms so that they will publish the print version, but we’ll be able to publish an electronic version of the book for non-commercial purposes. This means that we’ll be able to make something like a Gitbook version available for free (we’re very happy about this and I’d actually would like to thank our editor, Rob, for his help with this!).
Our book proposal has had very good reviews — frankly, I wasn’t expecting the reviewers to almost match my own enthusiasm! Here’s a draft and extremely ambitious high-level table of content.
Part 1 — Introduction to cost-effectiveness analysis
- (Very) basics of health economics
- Statistical modelling
- Software and computer configuration
Part 2 — Statistical modelling in cost-effectiveness analysis
- Individual level data
- Missing data
- Survival analysis
- Decision-analytic models
- Decision tree models
- Partition survival models
- Cohort Markov models in discrete-time
- Continuous time multistate models
- Discrete event simulation models
- Infectious disease models
- Indirect treatment comparisons
- Value of information
- Joint Modeling for the purposes of health economic evaluation
Part 3 – Standardising post-processing and health economic evaluation
- R-shiny web-applications
- SAVI
- BCEA
- hesim
- dampack
The plan is to involve quite a few people in the write up — I know it’ll be a hell of a job to keep things consistent and the number of pages \(<\infty\)! More on this as we move it along.