They will collaborate with other ARC themes and external research organisations in applying health economic and statistical methodologies to evaluate the feasibility, clinical effectiveness, resource impacts, implementation outcomes, patient benefits and cost-effectiveness of sustainable improvements of local health care services and interventions across a number of areas (e.g. children’s health, maternity care, social care and multimorbidity).
The theme will also explore the advancement of economic and statistical methods applied to implementation and service improvement: for example, the role of hybrid evaluative designs and use of existing frameworks to explore the implications of evidential uncertainty for decisions relating to the scale-up and spread of evidence-based practice.
This work will build on previous health economics and bio-statistics activities of specific themes undertaken at CLAHRC South London. It will also work closely with the implementation research theme and corroborate these quantitative sciences within the Centre for Implementation Science (CIS).
Research strategy
The overarching strategy will be to collaborate with other ARC themes and external research groups in a way that supports the wider aims of the ARC themes, applying appropriate methodologies for delivering outputs that will be helpful and informative for decision-makers, locally and nationally. We will also use these collaborations to explore and further develop economic and statistical methods applied to service improvement and implementation of best practice.
We will be fully integrated with the other themes of the ARC, and coordinate through the CIS. Where clinical research themes are developing and evaluating interventions we will provide health economics and biostatistics input to the analyses. We will contribute to the further validation and application of the ImpRes tool from the perspective of quantifying benefits and costs of implementation strategies as part of wider evaluations; and methodologies for implementation evaluations.
Our aims
- Identify areas of clinical and social care research where we can apply evaluative methods and develop economic models based on care pathways focussing on multimorbidity and health service sustainability.
- Apply existing evidence and economic modelling to support themes in identifying health service improvement options that are most likely to provide cost-effective solutions to improving patient and population health outcomes. Support the ARC research teams to ensure that health economic evaluation is fully integrated into the evaluation of all service improvement activity, interventions and implementation plans
- Support the training and development needs of researchers in health economics and biostastics such as the Implementation Science Masterclass and the MSc in Applied Statistical Modelling and Health Informatics, and to develop work programmes for post-doctoral fellows funded through the ARC south London.
Research projects
As well as exploring opportunities to collaborate with the ARC research themes on new projects we will continue to provide health economics and biostatistics expertise to existing collaborations that we established at CLAHRC South London. For example:
