This online course will serve as an introduction to some of the concepts and principles in the economics of health and health care, and will provide an in-depth understanding of some tools usually used by health economists to study health policy issues. Econometric techniques that are used to evaluate public health interventions and policy will be explained. Consideration is given to standard regression-based approaches, instrumental methods, interrupted time series, difference-in-difference analysis and matching methods for health data using statistical packages.
Aimed at PhD, MPhil and MD students, researchers, NHS professionals, GPs, managers and CEOs interested in pursuing a career in the field, this programme provides an introduction to the central issues in health economics and health policy.
The course will cover:
1) Health policy and economic principles and the distinction between health and health care.
2) Health care as an economic commodity.
3) How markets and insurance markets work, and how they can fail for health care and health insurance.
4) Incentive mechanisms and principal-agent relationships in health care.
5) Hospital competition and Diagnostic Related Group (DRG) payment schemes.
6) Economic evaluation.
The course will combine theoretical and applied methods using case studies and data analysis.
The course has a particular focus on the use of a statistical software package called Stata to study health data. It runs for 2 days, and there is an additional day before which is recommended for anyone unfamiliar with Stata.