Saturday 29 September 2012

The nineties are not cost-effective

After a few errands, this afternoon I took Marta to the station (on her way to meeting some friends in London) and got back at home to prepare my presentation for next week talk at a conference in Turin (the last of the 4 to which I've been invited this year $-$ personal best, so far).

They asked me to talk about Bayesian methods in pharmacoeconomics, which of course is just up my street and so I said yes. I've got lots to draw from and to say, but the time is not much (I only have 30 minutes as the invited session is pretty packed; Andrea Manca will be there too, so I think it'll be good). 

I've summarised the main points and because probably the audience will be made mostly by clinicians and practitioners, I've tried to avoid formulae as much as possible. I've not finished yet, but so far I'm fairly happy with what I've got, especially on sensitivity analysis, for which I've prepared flashy graphs and animations that should make the two tables on the next slides less boring and more comprehensible.

On the negative side, it took me far too long (and certainly longer than expected), mostly because 10 minutes after starting I had the brilliant idea to put some music on YouTube; I don't know why, but the first song I searched was this:



Great tune! But of course, for some weird mechanism, that completely filled my mind with songs from the 90s/early 00s. And so, while still occasionally modifying the presentation and checking that the LaTeX formatting was OK, I spent a lot of time searching them (probably even more than actually listening to them!). 

But it gets worse, because as I opened a new video, YouTube kept suggesting others I might like, for example this:



and this 


which in turn made me think to even more I thought I completely forgot (some of which quite cheesy, I have to admit).

So, at the end of it, I can conclude with indisputable scientific evidence that the Nineties are indeed not cost-effective. Unless, of course, I used this example in the talk to introduce cost-effectiveness analysis... 

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