Independent Media Agencies: Health economic evaluation studies: how to deal with missing data

Monday, 18 September 2017

Health economic evaluation studies: how to deal with missing data

This invited session at the RSS 2017 Conference on missing data in health economic evaluation studies was organised by Rumana Omar (UCL) on behalf of the RSS Medical Section. The speakers were Gianluca Baio (UCL), James Carpenter (UCL & LSHTM) and Andrew Briggs (Glasgow University).

Andrew Briggs began the session, explaining reasons why missing data are particularly problematic in health economic evaluation studies. He noted that economic sections of case report forms may sometimes be given less priority, leading to higher rates of missing data in variables required for economic evaluations compared to a trial’s primary outcome variable. He highlighted that a number of principled methods for handling missing data are being increasingly used, such as inverse probability weighting in longitudinal analyses, alongside causal inference methods which can (under assumptions) correct for treatment switching. Importantly, he noted that such methods are gaining increased acceptance by payer authorities in a number of countries.