M8 | Health Economics

Building awareness of the economic impact of digital health technology for patients, users and the wider system is crucial to improving the confidence of clinicians in decision making and enabling them to focus on value-based healthcare services. The goal of this module is to provide knowledge and tools to understand why health economics is important, to define a problem, and to use different types of analysis commission/co-design and interpret the outcome of a health economic evaluation.

Understand why health economics is important, being able to define a problem, understand different types of analysis, commission/co-design and interpret the outcome of a health economic evaluation. Building awareness of the economic impact of digital health technology for patients, users and the wider system is crucial to improve clinicians’ confidence in decision making to streamline activities and focus on value-based healthcare services.

The module will focus on the following main topics: 

• How to measure outcomes in health economic analysis, and how to value those outcomes
• The health economics principles of healthcare decision making - scarcity of resources, opportunity cost, willingness to pay
• Understand what information economic evaluations can provide
• How economics fits alongside other important decision criteria
• The most common types of health economic evaluations: cost effectiveness, cost utility and cost benefit analysis
• Sources of existing healthcare data
• How costs and outcomes are brought together in economic models
• How budget impact models are calculated: The Incremental Cost Effectiveness Ratio (ICER)
• Using checklists to ensure economic evaluations are produced according to a standardised approach

Alexandrina Petrova Stoyanova

Associate professor in Economics at the University of Barcelona, researcher at the Center for Economics Analysis and Social Policy, member of Barcelona Economic Analysis Team, EU Commission expert in the evaluation of Horizon 2020 Framework proposals and projects. Her research focuses on health economics, a subject she teaches at post-graduate level.

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