A while ago Anna and I published an editorial in Global & Regional Health Technology Assessment. In the paper we discuss one of my favourite topics how models for health technology assessment and cost-effectiveness analysis should increasingly move away from using spreadsheet (basically Excel) and towards proper statistical software.
The main arguments that historically have been used to support spreadsheet-based modelling are those of “simplicity and transparency” which really grinds my gears. In the paper we also argue that, may be, as statisticians we should invest in efforts towards designing our models using user-interfaces, or GUIs the obvious example is web-apps. This would expand and extend work done, eg in SAVI, or BCEAweb or bmetaweb, just to name a few (that I’m more familiar with…).