Society for Medical Decision Making

Description and Objectives:

Learning Objectives - after attending this short course, a student should be able to:

1. Describe what DICE simulation is and how it can be used for modeling the consequences of medical and public health decisions

2. Understand the DICE concepts, its advantages and limitations

3. Design, build and run a DICE model using MS Excel

4. Contrast DICE simulation with more traditional approaches to modeling.

This course explains the concepts underlying DICE simulation and how these models work. Students will be shown step-by-step how to design and implement a DICE model to structure anything from simple survival partition through Markov models, microsimulation and discrete event simulations. The course covers the components, the mechanics of implementing them, what to focus on during the model design, how to specify a DICE simulation in Excel and how to execute the model. This will include deterministic and probabilistic sensitivity analyses, scenarios and other analytic approaches. The method will be placed in the context of existing taxonomies of modeling techniques to facilitate a comparison with the traditional methods. Implementation of both Markov models and discrete event simulations, and their combination, within the DICE paradigm will be illustrated by building live examples.

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