Research

HEPAC seeks to conduct research that informs policy and practice through the generation of evidence on the value, cost effectiveness, and societal preferences for health technologies, health care, social care, and community care interventions that target individuals, their families and friends across the life course.

Evidence generated from economic evaluation methods is relevant for informing resource allocation decision-making by policy makers and practitioners in health and social care systems, while evidence generated from preference-based methods is relevant for the identification, measurement and valuation of the impact of illness, interventions or policies on the health and wellbeing of individuals, families and friends, and/or society.

The range of methodological expertise of HEPAC includes the following:

• Health Technology Assessment
• Economic Evaluation based on Randomised Controlled Trials
• Economic Evaluation based on Decision Analytic Models
• Early Health Economic Appraisal
• Evidence Synthesis for Economic Evaluation
• Budget Impact Analysis
• Costing and Cost Analysis
• Discrete Choice Experiments
• Time Trade Off Experiments
• Contingent Valuation Experiments

Researchers in HEPAC currently apply these methods in a variety of areas in collaboration with clinicians, health and social scientists at University of Galway and in other Irish, European and US research institutions. HEPAC provide health economic evaluation support to the Health Research Board (HRB)-Trials Methodology Research Network (TMRN), the HRB-Primary Care Clinical Trials Network Ireland (CTNI), the Diabetes Collaborative Clinical Trial Network Ireland (HRB DCCT-N-I), the HRB-Clinical Research Facility Galway (CRFG), Evidence Synthesis Ireland (ESI) and the SFI Research Centre for Medical Devices (CÚRAM). In addition, researchers at HEPAC and Queens University Belfast undertook a HRB funded study, in collaboration with and the support of the EUROQoL group, which developed and analysed a preference valuation set for the EQ-5D-5L health states among the Irish general public. The output from this project provided a set of preference weights for health in Ireland that can be applied for the future conduct of health economic evaluation and health technology assessment. Other studies in this methodological area include the estimation of public preferences for resource allocation across different types of healthcare programmes.