Health Economics and Health Technology Assessment (HEHTA)

Statistical Analysis of Linked Health Data (SALHDa)

Programme lead: Jim Lewsey

This programme encompasses all research work in HEHTA that is associated with statistical (and epidemiological) analysis of linked health data sets. The following projects are recently completed or ongoing:

Cardiovascular Disease Primary Prevention Policy Model

Funded by CSO, this work built a model that is capable of evaluating the impact of risk factor changes on life expectancy, quality adjusted life expectancy, and health service costs. The data set used was the Scottish Heart Health Extended Cohort (SHHEC) linked to Scottish Morbidity Records (SMR) and deaths.

HEHTA contact: Kenny Lawson, Jim Lewsey or Andy Briggs

Scottish Alcoholic Liver disease Evaluation of epidemiology and costs of first and subsequent hospital admissions (SCALE)

Funded by CSO and starting in Feb 2013, this work will study the epidemiology of first alcoholic liver disease (ALD) hospitalisations. Alcoholic liver disease (ALD) is a significant burden on health. Using this cohort of patients, trends over time, readmissions, mortality and economic burden will be analysed taking into account different subgroups (sex, age, socio-economic deprivation, geographical regions, comorbidities). The epidemiological research will feed into the development of an ALD health economic model. The data set to be used will be linked Scottish Morbidity Records (SMR01, SMR04, SMR06) and deaths.

HEHTA contact: Claudia Geue, Jim Lewsey or Andy Briggs

Statistical support for NHS Health Scotland

Funded by NHS Health Scotland, this work involves providing statistical support for a number of Health Scotland projects, including evaluation of Keep Well and Monitoring and Evaluating Scotland’s Alcohol Strategy (MESAS). The data sets being used involve market research based alcohol sales estimates, prescribing rates, SMR and deaths at a population and/or health board level.

HEHTA contact: Claudia Geue or Jim Lewsey

Population ageing in Scotland – Implications for healthcare expenditure

Funded through an MRC studentship, this 3 year PhD project (2009-2012) utilised the Scottish Longitudinal Study (SLS), linked to hospital admission records (SMR01) to estimate the effect that population ageing and remaining life time had on expenditure for acute inpatient care. It also investigated the use of two different methods in order to project future healthcare expenditure and looked specifically at the effect of socio-economic status on expenditure for hospital care at the end of life. Follow-on research from this project will be concerned with regional differences in healthcare utilisation and costs at the end of life.

HEHTA contact: Claudia Geue

Costs and complications of diabetes

Funded by the Wellcome Trust through the Scottish Health Informatics Programme (SHIP), this 3 year project (2009-2012) aimed to carry out epidemiologic and health economic analysis of diabetes by linking the Scottish Care Information – Diabetes Collaboration (SCI-DC) database (a dynamic national register of diagnosed cases of diabetes in Scotland) with information on hospital admissions obtained using Scottish Morbidity Records, and death records from the General Register Office for Scotland (GROS).    This project has been extended through funding by a 3-year MRC fellowship (2012-2015).  The main aims of the fellowship are to develop incidence-based models for both Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes in order to estimate the lifetime costs of diabetes and investigate the impact of potential new interventions for the management of diabetes.  This work will form a policy model to plan future health care for people with diabetes.

HEHTA contact: Lindsay Govan

In addition to funded research projects, the programme also includes methodological development in the area of linked health data analysis. This includes multi-state survival modelling

HEHTA contact: Claire Williams 

HEHTA provided a continuing professional development course on parametric survival modelling at the ESMDM 2012 conference.