Methodology Workshop Series, Spring 2015: Modelling decision making to make a difference

Methodology Workshop Series, Spring 2015: Modelling decision making to make a difference
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This is a past event

In the UK, policy decisions on the adoption of new treatments are informed by a cost-effectiveness analysis over a lifetime time horizon. However, evidence on relative treatment efficacy comes from randomised controlled trials (RCTs) that typically have a follow-up period of only a few years. Mean survival time is a key input to cost-effectiveness analysis, but is very sensitive to assumptions made on the extrapolation from the short-term RCT evidence into the long-term, and very different estimates can be obtained from different models that each fit the RCT data equally well. 

In this workshop we:

1. review how survival analysis differs when analysed for efficacy and for cost-effectiveness

2. demonstrate how we can reconstruct the data used to plot a published survival curve, for re-analysis

3. explore the use of other sources of information, external to the RCT data, that can be used to inform model choice and estimation in order to provide long-term extrapolation of survival curves for use in cost-effectiveness analysis.

We illustrate the methods using an RCT of cetuximab+radiotherapy vs radiotherapy for patients with head and neck cancer, reporting a 5-year follow-up.

Speaker
Dr Nicky Welton, Reader in Evidence Synthesis, University of Bristol
Venue
Room 115, Health Sciences Building, Foresterhill