Society for Medical Decision Making

Jeffrey Hoch, PhD is the Chief of the Division of Health Policy and Management in the Department of Public Health Sciences at the University of California at Davis. Also, he is the Associate Director of the Center for Healthcare Policy and Research at UC Davis. An award-winning teacher, Professor Hoch has taught Health Economics and Economic Evaluation classes throughout the world. Professor Hoch pursues research making health economics more useful to decision makers.

Format Requirements: The class will be structured with theory bursts followed by interactive exercises. Participants may have some familiarity with the concepts of economic evaluation, but it is not necessary since this class is targeted at a very introductory level. Participants do not need to bring a laptop computer. Attendees are invited to bring their own examples of scientific papers or abstracts that need to be translated into plain language to enhance comprehension and relevance, but attendees are not required to do so (we will provide examples from the SMDM scientific program).

Background: Cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) is the most popular type of economic evaluation. CEA produces estimates of the extra cost and patient outcomes when one or more new treatments are compared to usual care. CEA is often required by public payers internationally and is often the subject of presentations, posters and papers in academic settings. This course is part of the SMDM core course curriculum.

Description and Objectives: This is one of the four core short courses of the permanent SMDM curriculum. The SMDM curriculum is a new initiative of the Society with the goal of having a set of introductory-level core courses in foundational aspects of medical decision making. This effort serves the core mission of the Society to educate its members in key content areas, including decision modeling, cost-effectiveness analysis, the psychology of medical decision making, and shared decision making.

This class will answer the WHO, WHERE, WHY, WHEN, WHAT, HOW questions related to CEA. Given the introductory level, this class is for individuals interested in developing their understanding of SMDM posters and presentations.  Our objective is that attendees will be able to explain more confidently what presenters have done, what they have found and what it means. We will practice identifying meaningful knowledge being conveyed in the four languages: Plain language, Math, Graph and Jargon.  In addition, attendees will complete this class with the confidence to engage more thoroughly with the producers of economic evaluations meant to inform medical decision making.  Lastly, we will review guidance documents featuring “best practices” for doing CEA.

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