Quantifying and Valuing Inequality Impacts in Economic Evaluation
Description and Objectives:
The lack of formal analysis of health inequality impacts in health technology assessment and economic evaluation may hinder their influence on decision making. This course addresses that gap by teaching participants how to quantify health inequality impacts in economic evaluation of health policies and interventions. An introduction will set the context for how and why impact on health inequality is central to allocation decisions in health. Participants will learn about common measures used to summarise the extent of inequality in a distribution of healthy life expectancy, including the slope index of inequality and the relative index of inequality. They will learn how to communicate the dual impacts of interventions on both average health and health inequality using the health equity impact plane. They will also learn how impacts on total health and health inequality can be combined in summary measures that value health inequality impacts in terms of either societal welfare or health. Participants will be taught about equally distributed equivalent health as a direct and simple way of communicating the impact of interventions on the distribution of health.
Objectives:
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Participants will learn how and why health inequality impact is relevant to allocation decisions in health care.
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They will learn how to use economic evaluation to estimate a distribution of health, and to estimate the change in the distribution of health attributable to an intervention or policy.
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Participants will learn how to apply measures to quantify and summarise health inequality
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Participants will learn how to construct a health equity impact plane
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Participants will learn how to combine total health impact with health inequality impact into a single summary measure in terms of either societal welfare or health
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Participants will understand how to calculate and interpret the equally distributed equivalent health.
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MDM offers rigorous and systematic approaches to decision making that are designed to improve the health and clinical care of individuals and to assist with health policy development.