Heejung Bang, Ph.D., Cornell
December 8, 2009 @ 3:30 pm - 4:30 pmLocation: BRB - 251
Biostatistics
TITLE: Analysis of (censored) medical cost data:
Methodology developments for last 10 years and some thoughts for future
directions
Medical cost and quality-adjusted lifetime are important health outcomes
data that are often collected from clinical trials and observational
studies. Although these data look different, they share many of common
statistical properties and can be understood in a unified framework. Just
like standard survival data, censoring is an important issue in these
data. Despite the analogy, censoring mechanism is informative, different
from the traditional paradigm. It has been a decade since it was shown
that use of most standard statistical techniques such as sample mean,
linear regression and Kaplan-Meier estimator can be invalid. However, we often find that even experienced researchers still use
traditional methods for the analysis of health outcome data in practice.
In this seminar, we will review valid methods for statistical estimation
and inference that have been developed for last 10 years. Unfortunately,
not all are easy or user-friendly and no commercial software is available
so far. Therefore, we will suggest some methods as practical solutions
for practitioners. We will also present the analytic relationships among
well known medical cost estimators recently identified. Extended
applications to customer lifetime value and cost-effectiveness analysis
will be discussed and some new thoughts for future research directions
will be suggested.
