Bayesian Methods in Health Economics

Book excerpt: Health economics is concerned with the study of the cost-effectiveness of health care interventions. This book provides an overview of Bayesian methods for the analysis of health economic data. After an introduction to the basic economic concepts and methods of evaluation, it presents Bayesian statistics using accessible mathematics. The next chapters describe the theory and practice of cost-effectiveness analysis from a statistical viewpoint, and Bayesian computation, notably MCMC. The final chapter presents three detailed case studies covering cost-effectiveness analyses using individual data from clinical trials, evidence synthesis and hierarchical models and Markov models. The text uses WinBUGS and JAGS with datasets and code available online.