Discrete Event Simulation for Health Technology Assessment

This is the first book to make all the central concepts of discrete event simulation relevant for health technology assessment. Accessible to beginners, the book requires no prerequisites and describes the concepts with as little jargon as possible. It presents essential concepts, a fully worked out implementation example, approaches to analyze the simulations, the development of the required equations, model verification techniques, and validation. The book also covers various special topics and includes a real case study involving screening strategies for breast cancer surveillance.

J. Jaime Caro, MDCM, FRCPC, FACP, is an adjunct professor of medicine as well as epidemiology and biostatistics at McGill University. He also teaches discrete event simulation (DES) at Thomas Jefferson University School of Population Health and is chief scientist at Evidera. He founded the Caro Research Institute, chaired the Modeling Task Force jointly sponsored by the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR) and the Society for Medical Decision Making (SMDM), chaired the Expert Panel guiding the German government on methods for health technology assessment (HTA), and helped the World Bank Institute address the growing problem of supreme courts overriding health care system decisions. Jorgen Moller, MSc Mech Eng, is an associate researcher in the Division of Health Economics, Faculty of Medicine at Lund University and vice president of modeling technology at Evidera. He is an expert in health care and logistics management decision modeling using advanced techniques. His work focuses on translating methods from operations research to pharmacoeconomics, developing guidelines for this type of modeling, and conducting advanced courses in DES and Arena software. Jonathan Karnon, PhD, is a professor in health economics at the University of Adelaide. He wrote one of the few papers that directly compared cohort state transition models and DES techniques for HTA, built a range of DES HTA models for the evaluation of alternative screening strategies, and co-chaired the ISPOR/SMDM modeling good research practices taskforce working group on the use of DES for HTA. James E. Stahl, MDCM, MPH, is an associate professor of medicine in the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College, Section Chief of General Internal Medicine at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, the director of systems engineering for the Point of Care Testing Research Network at the Cen

Introduction. Central Concepts. Implementation. A Simple Example. Analyses. Formulating the Required Equations. Efficiency and Variance Reduction. Validation. Special Topics. Case Study: Breast Cancer Surveillance.