PTNA And The University of Melbourne
PTNA has partnered with the Centre for Health Policy at The University of Melbourne to bring you access to Health Economics experts to assist with your paediatric clinical trial grants and to build economics into your trial design regardless of where you are located. This is one of the ways PTNA can add value at the trial concept phase.
Over the last 3 decades in Australia we have seen a large increase in the number of applications for funding for clinical trials through funding bodies like NHMRC but at the same time the rates of success have fallen.
In this competitive environment economic evaluation can be a useful addition to clinical trial design. Economic evaluation and cost-effectiveness analysis are increasingly expected as part of a funding application.
Economic evaluation aims to assess the additional costs of the intervention relative to the additional benefits achieved. It can be helpful in establishing a case for funding a particular intervention over and above others. Estimates of the costs of scaling an intervention to a state/national level are possible to inform budgets for broader implementation plans.
Economics focuses on real world application of results and can apply modelling beyond the length of trial follow up. It is common to also link to administrative costing data such as Hospital or Medicare data which also provides opportunity for longer term follow up of resulting health service utilisation. Economic evaluation adds to the publication output and can provide meaningful results even in the event of unsuccessful clinical outcomes or trials stopped early.
The Centre for Health Policy kindly provides a sample of free resources and advice which can be accessed here.
Through PTNA the University of Melbourne can also offer discounts on Health Economics short courses. Click here for the short course brochure which includes courses such as:
- Introduction to Cost-Effectiveness Analysis in Health
- Designing Economic Evaluation Alongside Clinical Studies
- Practical Methods for Health Economic Evaluation
- Incorporating Health Economics into Grant Proposals