Space is limited in the HERC courses, and priority is given to students who are affiliated with VA. Several of the lectures in the HERC courses are specific to VA cost and utilization data. This document provides alternatives to the HERC courses. This includes alternative venues for the HERC courses, and other courses that may be useful to non-VA researchers.
Alternative venues for the HERC coursesIf you are unable to enroll in a HERC course, it may be possible to view a recorded archive of each lecture. Some archived course content is limited to VA employees, other content is available to a broader audience. Please see the HSR&D training page for details:
http://www.hsrd.research.va.gov/cyberseminars/
Other organizations teach cost-effectiveness workshops that are not specific to VA. Tuition is charged for all of these courses.
The Society for Medical Decision Making provides short courses in association with its annual meeting, held each October. In previous years, these have included half-day sessions on economic evaluation. For more information, see:
http://www.smdm.org/.
The Program for Assessment of Technology in Health (PATH), http://www.path-hta.ca/ affiliated with McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, has offered a workshop on Advanced Methods for the Economic Evaluation of Medicines. It currently offers a workshop on economic modeling. For more information, see: http://www.path-hta.ca/Workshops.aspx
Courses on economic evaluation have been offered by the Centre for Health Economics, The University of York, UK.
http://www.york.ac.uk/che/ See their "short courses" on economics at: http://www.york.ac.uk/che/courses/short/
A list of training opportunities in health economics is available at HealthEconomics.com. However, this list may be out of date.
http://www.healtheconomics.com/education.cfm
Pre-conference workshops are offered each June at the Conference of the American Society of Health Economists.
http://healtheconomics.us/
In recent years, these have included workshops on "Economic Evaluation of Drugs, Devices and other Medical Interventions," and "Health Econometrics of Health Cost, Expenditure and Utilization Data."
Information on these workshops is found on the pages with conference details.
Read Cost-effectiveness in health and medicine by M.R. Gold and Methods for the economic evaluation of health care programmes by MF Drummond. For more information, visit the "Introduction to Cost-Effectiveness Analysis (CEA)" webpage.