Project
Health-economic evaluations of prevention policies in Flanders
Due to increasing health care costs and limited resources in health care, it is important to inform health care policy makers about the expected health outcomes and the expected costs of interventions. In this PhD, three topics related to current preventive policy in Flanders will be selected. For each topic, the following research questions will be answered: (1) What is the current knowledge regarding cost-effectiveness of the topic?; and (2) wat is the most cost-effective strategy within the Flemish context, in comparison with other strategies?
The first research question will be answered during a first phase. This can be seen as an exploratory phase, in which a systematic review on cost-effectiveness is performed.
The second phase provides an answer to the second research question and consist of a health-economic evaluation, such as the development of a health-economic model. By means of decision trees and/or Markov models, different prevention strategies will be compared with the use of an incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER). Expected costs are considered, together with expected health outcomes. In the particular case of prevention, it often concerns present costs and future health outcomes, which creates an additional challenge for such types of evaluations. Sensitivity analyses will be performed to assess the impact of uncertainty for the used input parameters.