IS THE COMPLEXITY OF ECONOMIC EVALUATION INFLUENCING DECISION MAKING?
Moderator: Mike F. Drummond, PhD, Professor, University of York, York, UK Panelist(s): Don Husereau, BSc, MSc, CADTH, Ottawa, ON, Canada; Mark J. Sculpher, PhD, Professor, Centre for Health Economics, University of York, York, UK ISSUE: Is the technical complexity of economic models used in assessing new health care technologies (including pharmaceuticals) is adding to the difficulties faced by decision makers in this area? If the technical demands are too great, or the modelling becomes a “black box” then policy makers may find economic modelling is not easily translatable and fails to provide the appropriate information to aid their decision making. While they may be able to retrieve an outcome measure (say cost per QALY or cost per life year gained) they may not be able to fully justify how this was derived, or indeed may make inappropriate inferences about the outcome depending on the model used to derive the measure. On the other hand proponents of complex modelling may defend it
