Applied Methods of Cost-effectiveness Analysis in Healthcare

Alastair Gray was appointed Director of the Health Economics Research Centre, Division of Public Health and Primary Care, University of Oxford, in October 1996, and became Professor of Health Economics in 2002. He has previously held appointments at the University of Aberdeen (where he completed his PhD), the Open University (where he was on the core team of the successful Health and Disease course) and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He teaches and supervises undergraduate and graduate students, and on HERC short courses in Oxford and abroad. He has acted as adviser to the WHO and other agencies.Dr Philip Clarke joined the School of Public Health, University of Sydney in February 2006 after spending six years engaged in health economic research at the University of Oxford. While based in Oxford he was primarily involved in the economic analysis of the United Kingdom Prospective Diabetes Study (UKPDS) a landmark trial of policies to improve the management of people with Type 2 diabetes. His health economic research interests include developing methods to value the benefits of improving access to health care, health inequalities and the use of simulation models in health economic evaluation. He has also undertaken policy relevant research for the World Bank and the OCED.Jane Wolstenholme joined the Health Economics Research Centre in December 1998, having previously worked at the University of Nottingham. Her main research interests lie in the areas of economic evaluation and health technology assessment from applied and methodological perspectives. During 2005 she was engaged on projects in modelling cost-effectiveness of prostate cancer screening and cervical cancer screening; economic evaluation alongside a RCT for the treatment of subarachnoid aneurysm; and assessing the usefulness of cost-effectiveness data in priority setting. She is currently co-supervising two PhD students and one research officer and involved with teaching the MSc in global health and the HERC Advanced Methods course. She is an Associate of the Oxford Institute for Ageing and a member of the Health Economics Futures Group.Sarah Wordsworth joined the Health Economics Research Centre in January 2003 and has worked largely on the economics of genetics, linked to the Oxford Genetics Knowledge Park. Of particular interest are the costs and benefits of translating genetics research into clinical practice, in both cancer and cardiovascular disease. In October 2006 Sarah took up a post-doctoral fellowship from the Department of Health. This fellowship is to undertake a programme of methodological and applied research on the economic evaluation of novel genomic technologies in the NHS. Sarah's other interests include costing methodology and the economics of dialysis therapy, which was the subject of her PhD. Prior to this appointment, Sarah worked in the Health Economics Research Unit at the University of Aberdeen from 1995-2002, after completing her MSc in Health Economics in 1995, at the University of York.

• 1. Introduction