When simple becomes complicated…

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…).