Using distributional cost-effectiveness analysis to reduce health inequality
Professor Richard Cookson
This talk will introduce the methods now available for analysing the equity impacts of health technologies and programs and the trade-offs that sometimes arise between equity and efficiency, with examples from the UK. Distributional cost-effectiveness analysis (DCEA) can analyse equity in the distribution of costs and effects between more and less socially disadvantaged groups, as well as efficiency in terms of aggregate costs and effects. It can address three main questions: (i) is this intervention likely to increase or reduce health inequality, (ii) how large or small is the impact on health inequality likely to be, compared with the impacts on health inequality of other interventions in other disease areas, and (iii) how much concern for reducing health inequality would be needed to consider this intervention worthwhile, taking into account both cost-effectiveness and health inequality impact? Conducting a full DCEA can be resource intensive, but simplified approaches are available. In principle, any country or organisation can use DCEA - they just need to specify the relevant social disadvantage groups, estimate distributions of effects and opportunity costs, create summary indices of health inequality impact and, where appropriate, analyse equity-efficiency trade-offs.
Richard Cookson is a Professor at the Centre for Health Economics, University of York. He has helped pioneer “equity-informative” methods of economic evaluation and performance monitoring that provide information about the impacts of interventions and organisations on inequalities in health and wellbeing, including distributional cost-effectiveness analysis, health equity indicators for healthcare quality assurance, methods for investigating public concern for reducing health inequality, and microsimulation methods for long-term childhood policy analysis. He has also worked in the UK Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit and served on various NHS advisory committees.
This lecture is accredited with 1 DFP-point for members of the Austrian Medical Chamber.
Registration
For further information and registration (free) please contact:
E-mail: primhe@meduniwien.ac.at
Telephone: +43 1 40160 34848
http://healtheconomics.meduniwien.ac.at/primhe/