Anthony O'Hagan and John W. Stevens
Centre for Bayesian Statistics in Health Economics, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, England and Astra Charnwood, Loughborough, England
Publication details: Statistical Methods in Medical Research, 11, 469-490, 2002.
We review the development of Bayesian statistical methods for the design and analysis of randomised controlled trials in the assessment of the cost-effectiveness of health care technologies. We place particular emphasis on the benefits of the Bayesian approach; the implications of skew cost data; the need to model the data appropriately to generate efficient and robust inferences instead of relying on distribution-free methods; the importance of making full use of quantitative and structural prior information to produce realistic inferences; and issues in the determination of sample size. Several new examples are presented to illustrate the methods. We conclude with a discussion of the key areas for future research.
Keywords: Bayesian statistics; cost-effectiveness; health economics; clinical trial; cost-effectiveness acceptability curve; genuine prior information; elicitation; sample size; experimental design.