Nathan Green has alerted/invited me to another workshop aimed at increasing the use of R in Health Economics. He and I had some discussion in the past few months and especially around the time we were running our workshop back in July.

The “scoping” workshop at Imperial has also a very interesting set up — all the details are here. I am also summarising the headlines below.

A one day workshop will be held at Imperial College London to identify limitations in existing software for economic evaluations, and scope opportunities for using the statistical software language R.

The day will consist of invited talks and round table discussions. Both academic and corporate colleagues are invited to attend from a wide range of disciplines including health economics, software development, and the pharmaceutical industry, to contribute differing views and experiences.

Background The evaluation of the societal value of interventions in health are informed by health economics but the most commonly used computational tools, often packages interacting with Excel, are limited in their abilities to analyse increasingly large and complex data sets (e.g. in precision medicine or using “Big Data”) in short time-frames (e.g. for emergency preparedness and response), and especially in the context of infectious disease modelling and associated probabilistic sensitivity analyses.

Aims Our goal is to develop novel, user-friendly analysis tools for widespread adoption to enable better-informed, rapid decision making by health economists, practitioners and others using widely available software.

Outcomes The workshop will identify and clarify: – What is the demand for these tools and by whom? – What are the issues with current software? – What can and should the new tools do better?

The workshop will kick start prototypes of functions, data and packages to be released publicly, as well as training courses in using the new tools and papers.

Attendance is free and lunch will be provided.

Registration is available here!