Resources Repository
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ArticlePublication 2023Benefits and Costs of COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates
Written mid-pandemic, this article evaluates the direct costs and health benefits of requiring COVID-19 vaccinations …
Written mid-pandemic, this article evaluates the direct costs and health benefits of requiring COVID-19 vaccinations for U.S. federal employees and healthcare and private sector workers. These mandates were controversial and some were halted by litigation. If they had been implemented as intended, the net benefits would depend on the course of the pandemic. If a more transmissible variant (such as Omicron) emerges, the net benefits may be large. If the pandemic instead fades, the benefits…
Benefit-Cost Analysis | State-Transition | Business/Industry | Economics/Finance | Mathematical Models | Infectious Diseases | Policy/Regulation | Government/Law | Health/Medicine | North America -
ReviewPublication 2016Remembering Howard Raiffa
Howard Raiffa (1924-2016) had a profound influence on all aspects of the decision sciences and on …
Howard Raiffa (1924-2016) had a profound influence on all aspects of the decision sciences and on the fields of systems analysis and operations research. He guided the introduction of the decision sciences into numerous fields such as business, medicine, public health, the environmental sciences, and law, and was instrumental in building world-recognized institutions such as the Kennedy School at Harvard and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis near Vienna, Austria. This article is a thoughtful tribute by…
Operations Research | Decision Analysis | Business/Industry | Economics/Finance | Decision Theory | Preferences/Values | Health/Medicine | Military/Defense | North America -
ArticlePublication 2007Decision Analysis: A Personal Account of How It Got Started and Evolved
In this chapter, Howard Raiffa discusses the evolution of decision analysis and his personal involvement …
In this chapter, Howard Raiffa discusses the evolution of decision analysis and his personal involvement in its development. He describes the early days of Operations Research (OR) in the late 1940s with its approach to complex, strategic decision making. After reading John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern’s Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1947) and Abraham Wald’s two books (1947, 1950), he became involved in statistical decision theory. A few years later, after reading Leonard…
Operations Research | Decision Analysis | Business/Industry | Economics/Finance | Decision Theory | Probability/Bayes | Preferences/Values | Energy/Engineering | Health/Medicine -
ReviewPublication 2001Modeling for Health Care and Other Policy Decisions: Uses, Roles and Validity
This is a review article of the role of modeling approaches to guide decision making …
This is a review article of the role of modeling approaches to guide decision making in health care and other domains. The role of models to support recommendations on the cost-effective use of medical technologies and pharmaceuticals is controversial. At the heart of the controversy is the degree to which experimental or other empirical evidence should be required prior to model use. The authors argue that the controversy stems in part from a misconception that…
Evidence Synthesis | Technology Assessment | Business/Industry | Economics/Finance | Priority Setting/Ethics | Mathematical Models | Environmental Health | Health Systems | Policy/Regulation | Climate/Environment | Energy/Engineering | Government/Law | Health/Medicine | North America -
ArticlePublication 2022Vaccinations versus Lockdowns to Prevent COVID-19 Mortality
This analysis estimated the costs associated with preventing Covid-19 deaths by vaccinations versus lockdowns. Publicly …
This analysis estimated the costs associated with preventing Covid-19 deaths by vaccinations versus lockdowns. Publicly available datasets from the Israeli Ministry of Health were used to model the parameters of the pandemic in Israel. The Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker was used for quantitative data on government policies. Data on the Israeli economy were taken from the Central Bureau of Statistics. The models demonstrate that the first lockdown prevented 1022 COVID-19 deaths at the cost…
Decision Analysis | State-Transition | Economics/Finance | Decision Theory | Costing Methods | Health Outcomes | Infectious Diseases | Policy/Regulation | Government/Law | Health/Medicine | Middle East & North Africa -
ArticlePublication 2022Emerging Therapies for COVID-19: The Value of Information From More Clinical Trials
The COVID-19 pandemic necessitated time-sensitive policy and implementation decisions regarding new therapies in the face …
The COVID-19 pandemic necessitated time-sensitive policy and implementation decisions regarding new therapies in the face of uncertainty. This study aimed to quantify consequences of approving therapies or pursuing further research. The authors used a cohort state-transition model for hospitalized patients with COVID-19 to estimate quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs) and costs associated with multiple drug regimens and usual care. For each they assessed immediate approval, use only in research, emergency use authorization or reject. They conducted cost-effectiveness…
Benefit-Cost Analysis | State-Transition | Economics/Finance | Value of Information | Infectious Diseases | Policy/Regulation | North America | Europe -
ReviewPublication 2016Using Economic Evidence to Set Healthcare Priorities in LMIC
Policy makers in low-income and lower-middle-income countries (LMICs) are increasingly looking to develop ‘evidence-based’ frameworks …
Policy makers in low-income and lower-middle-income countries (LMICs) are increasingly looking to develop ‘evidence-based’ frameworks for identifying priority health interventions. This paper synthesizes and appraises the literature on methodological frameworks – which incorporate economic evaluation evidence – for the purpose of setting healthcare priorities in LMICs. A systematic search of Embase, MEDLINE, Econlit and PubMed identified 3968 articles with a further 21 articles identified through manual searching. A total of 36 papers were eligible for inclusion.…
Technology Assessment | Benefit-Cost Analysis | Economics/Finance | Priority Setting/Ethics | Cost-Effectiveness Analysis | Health Systems | Policy/Regulation | Government/Law | Health/Medicine | Sub-Saharan Africa | Middle East & North Africa | Latin America & Caribbean | Asia & Pacific -
ArticlePublication 2015Broader Economic Impact of Vaccination: Reviewing and Appraising the Strength of Evidence
Economic evaluations of public health programs such as immunization often consider only direct health benefits and …
Economic evaluations of public health programs such as immunization often consider only direct health benefits and medical cost savings. Evidence linking immunization to important benefits in indicators such as childhood development, household behavior, and other macro-economic data are unclear. A conceptual framework of the pathways between immunization and these broader economic benefits was developed through expert consultation. The authors obtained articles from previous reviews, snowballing, and expert consultation, and associated them with one of the pathways and assessed them using modified Grading…
Evidence Synthesis | Benefit-Cost Analysis | Economics/Finance | Preferences/Values | Priority Setting/Ethics | Costing Methods | Cost-Effectiveness Analysis | Infectious Diseases | Social Determinants | Education/Labor | Health/Medicine -
ReviewPublication 2011Simulation Models of Obesity: A Review of the Literature
Simulation models combine information from a variety of sources to provide a useful tool for …
Simulation models combine information from a variety of sources to provide a useful tool for examining how the effects of obesity unfold over time and impact population health. They can aid in the understanding of the complex interaction of the drivers of diet and activity and their relation to health outcomes. This paper provided an overview of different types of simulation models used to evaluate the potential impact of policies to address the obesity epidemic.…
Decision Analysis | State-Transition | Economics/Finance | Mathematical Models | Microsimulation | Calibration/Validation | Cost-Effectiveness Analysis | Child/Nutrition | Chronic Disease/Risk | Food/Agriculture | Health/Medicine