Across the health care system, administrators, clinicians and researchers all face the challenge of justifying their decisions with particular emphasis on cost effectiveness. Economic evaluation of health interventions provides a powerful tool to address these questions.
SPHA 531 Economic Evaluation (MHA Year Two) teaches students to apply a specific cost-effectiveness analysis to approach resource allocation problems specific to health interventions, ie. Do they represent good choices from a value for money perspective? The course teaches the concept of maximizing the health benefits accruing from finite health care budgets. Economic evaluation is one specialty area within the larger domain of health economics.
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Instructor Profile
Dr. Aslam Anis
Professor, School of Population and Public Health
Director, Centre for Health Evaluation and Outcomes Sciences
Dr. Anis is a Professor in the School of Population and Public Health (SPPH) at the University of British Columbia (UBC), a respected health economist and sought-after speaker on the topic of economic evaluation and resource allocation for health care interventions. His primary areas of expertise include Canadian competition policy in the pharmaceutical industry and the cost-effectiveness of treatments for HIV/AIDS and rheumatoid arthritis. Dr. Anis is the Director of the Centre for Health Evaluation and Outcomes Sciences (CHEOS), one of the largest and most productive multidisciplinary health outcomes research groups in Canada. He is also the National Director of the CIHR Canadian HIV Trials Network (CTN), a Senior Scientist at the Arthritis Research Centre of Canada, and a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences. Between 2008 and 2013 Dr. Anis was the Co-Lead of the Health Services and Systems theme at SPPH.
Dr. Anis’s research activities have been extensive. His earliest research into the pharmaceutical industry demonstrated that pricing regulations as they were being implemented by provincial drug plans were responsible for higher generic drug prices in Canada. As the founding director of the Pharmacoeconomic Initiative of BC, Dr. Anis developed a framework under which pharmaceutical firms seeking to list drugs on the provincial formulary were required to submit cost-effectiveness data to inform the government’s decision. In the 1990s, Dr. Anis was among the first scholars worldwide to demonstrate the cost-effectiveness of anti-retroviral therapy (ART) and his work helped shape economic policies governing access to this critical treatment for persons living with HIV/AIDS. As an expert in cost-effectiveness analysis, Dr. Anis has also made important contributions to arthritis research. In the area of rheumatoid arthritis, Dr. Anis has been involved in several influential studies of biologic therapies, which have informed reimbursement policies surrounding these treatments in Canada and the UK.