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New PhD opportunity in health economics and genomics

James Buchanan Other , , , , , , ,

I’m pleased to announce that we are offering a DPhil (PhD) position here at the Health Economics Research Centre in the area of health economics and genomics. The proposed start date is October 2017 and the full title is “Linking genomic and clinical data in health economic evaluations: identifying challenges and exploring potential solutions“.

The aim of this DPhil project is to comprehensively investigate the challenges and opportunities in this area using data from the 100,000 Genomes Project, with an emphasis on rare diseases.

The deadline for applications is 1200 noon UK time on Friday 6th January 2017.

If anybody has any questions about this project then please don’t hesitate to get in touch by email (james.buchanan@dph.ox.ac.uk). Please also share the details of this project with anybody who you think might be interested.

Full details of this project are available here.

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Health economic perspectives of genomics

James Buchanan Other , , , , , , , , ,

Just a quick note to say that a book titled “Genomics and Society; Ethical, Legal-Cultural, and Socioeconomic Implications” was published today (available on Amazon here).

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In this book you can find a chapter that I co-wrote with Dr Sarah Wordsworth from HERC and Professor Adrian Towse from the Office of Health Economics titled “Health economic perspectives of genomics”. You can read the chapter via Google Books here, and you may also be able to download a copy here, depending on your institutional access. I hope it is of interest.

Genomics at the 2015 iHEA meeting in Milan

James Buchanan Other , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Apologies for the recent lack of blog posts. It turns out it takes a lot of effort to get a PhD written up alongside other research commitments. Normal service will be resumed very soon. For now, a few quick notes on the International Health Economics Association meeting in Milan which has just concluded. Specifically, this is a quick review of the presentations that I attended which had a link (however tenuous!) to genomics. Continue reading →

Cost-effectiveness analysis and genetics – the zombie technique that will never die

James Buchanan Other , , , , , ,

Terry Flynn recently blogged on how treatment tailored to genes will kill economic evaluation. It’s a catchy title that I hope will draw health economists working outside of genetics into a growing debate on the best way to do economic evaluation in genetics and genomics. However, I don’t entirely agree with everything that Terry said and wanted to respond on a few points:

Continue reading →

Personalised Medicine and Resource Allocation

James Buchanan Other , , , , ,

Yesterday in Oxford we hosted a conference titled “Personalised Medicine and Resource Allocation”. The conference aimed to explore the challenges of implementing genomic medicine into widespread clinical practice, and there was a particular focus on the generation of economic evidence and the ethical issues that arise in the resource allocation decisions required to allow personalised medicine to be realised.

I was pleased to be asked to speak at the event, and I presented alongside Jilles Fermont on “Methodological issues surrounding the health economic evaluation of genomic technologies and a case study of these issues in the research setting”. It was an interesting day overall, and I suspect that others will blog more extensively on the various topics that were discussed. For now, I’ll leave a link to our slides, in case anybody is interested in this topic. For more information on the day itself, please visit the conference website or follow the proceedings on Twitter via the hashtag #PMRAoxford.

Welfarism versus extra-welfarism: an important analytical decision in genomics?

James Buchanan Other , , , , , , ,

In my first blog post, I posed a number of questions that were relevant in health economics and genomics. One of these was “Is there a greater role for cost-benefit analysis in genomics?”. I’m working towards contributing to this debate with my PhD (if I ever finish), and one of the byproducts of my PhD is this paper, published over the weekend in PharmacoEconomics, titled: “Welfarism Versus Extra-Welfarism: Can the Choice of Economic Evaluation Approach Impact on the Adoption Decisions Recommended by Economic Evaluation Studies?”. I hope it mght be relevant to other health economists working in genomics, so I thought I would share it here. There are (hopefully!) a few findings of note, but I guess the main take-home message is this: “We found that for every five studies applying both approaches, one shows limited or no concordance in economic evaluation results: the different approaches suggest conflicting adoption decisions, and there is no pattern to which approach provides the most convincing adoption evidence”. It certainly provides food for thought when designing economic evaluations in genomics.

Genomics, the data revolution and health economics – the 2015 Astellas Innovation Debate

James Buchanan Other , , , , , , , ,

Last week I attended the Astellas Innovation Debate (“i-Genes: What the DNA and Data revolutions mean for our health”) at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in London. This was an interesting event and I was pleased to get the opportunity to make a couple of points during the debate itself. I also wrote about the debate and the wider implications of this revolution from a health economics perspective for the BMJ. You can read this blog here.

Interested readers can watch the entire 2015 debate at http://www.innovationdebate.com/.