What is health economic modelling?
In the context of our Centre of Research Excellence for Driving Global Investment in Adolescent Health, health economic modelling involves building a mathematical representation or model of how people move between health states (i.e. from being health to becoming infected with a virus, or experiencing a mental health condition) based on risks they face.
Once we have built this model and we are confident in its ability represents the real world we can run scenarios on this model to see what would happen to important health outcome if we introduced an intervention, scaled up an existing intervention or policy change in the model. The economic side of things comes in once we apply costs to the scenarios we run, where we can then calculate how much the intervention costs each year or how much it would cost if we scaled it up to effect more people. We can then calculate how much money was saved by either treating someone with a health outcome or preventing them from experiencing it initially. Further, once we have a set of interventions, services, policy changes and other actions that influence the model we can run a process of optimisation to arrive at which set of actions will have the largest effect on the burden of the disease given a pre-specified amount of money available to be spent.
This publication, A model of the economic benefits of global hepatitis C elimination: an investment case showcases examples of disease models the Burnet Institute uses to assist in the elimination of Hepatitis C. Initially a model is built to represent the transmission of Hepatitis C in the Australian Community and in order to attain elimination, scenarios can be run to test which set of interventions will achieve this and how much that will cost.
Additional to this, here is Dr Nick Scott talking about one application of this type of modelling in family planning and maternal health:
Why is this important?
This is really important because it gives us a means to answer to the much asked question of “If I have a certain amount of money to spend on improving Adolescent health, where is my money best spent and what will it improve?” In addition to this, because of the available expertise in the CRE working group we are able to rely on the experience and findings of all of the CRE members to assist in filling the model with data and checking how well the model is able to represent the real world.
What work are we currently undertaking?
We are in the final stages of building the first module to represent Mental Health in Australian adolescents and beginning to run financial scenarios on which services and interventions can be scaled up to make a difference to adolescent mental health. Once this module is complete, we can join it with modules representing several domains of adolescent health.
What next?
Over the next year we will build modules for the following health adolescent health themes – injury, substance use, justice health, non-communicable disease in the Australian context. Once we have completed this and are able to run financial simulations and have checked the results with the CRE team we aim to publish the findings and begin to extend the models for use in global contexts.
Team members
Lead/s: Dr Nick Scott and Dr Kim Sweeny
Research team: Alex Thomas
Collaborators: each workstream
Key papers
Development of the Investment Case to Reduce Road Traffic Injuries among Adolescents
This report examines how proven road safety interventions introduced at scale in the 77 countries could prevent death and serious injury to youth, from 10 years old to 24, between now and 2050.
Road traffic injury is the leading global cause of death for young people aged 5-29. These injuries can be life-changing and life-long for victims and their families. The research model looked at how proven interventions including traffic speed reductions, safe road infrastructure design, motorcycle helmets, drink driving enforcement and vehicle safety measures would save lives and deliver economic returns on investment.