PhD ceremony Ms. L. Mohseninejad: Uncertainty in economic evaluation: implications for healthcare decisions

PhD ceremony: Ms. L. Mohseninejad

Dissertation: Uncertainty in economic evaluation: implications for healthcare decisions

Promotor(s): prof. E. Buskens

Faculty: Medical Sciences

Economic evaluations, especially cost-effectiveness analyses, play an increasing role in supporting policy making in health care. In these methods, additional costs and health benefits of a new drug/health intervention are compared to the standard of care. When the additional costs and benefits of the new technology are balanced in a way that the adoption is worthwhile, the health policy can change in favor of the new technology. Different diseases with various specifications and progression stages would need different ways of calculating the long term costs and health effects. However, since any assessment of the effects as well as costs will remain uncertain to some degree, any decision based on cost-effectives will also be uncertain. This uncertainty arises from different sources, and can have an important effect on the results.

The objective of this thesis is to explore different ways of handling the uncertainty in economic evaluation of new medical technologies and to extend the methods of the uncertainty analysis. Beside the methodological contribution, I explore different policy options in uncertainty management and contribute to the methods of linking reimbursement of medical products to the collection of additional evidence.