BCEA: An R Package for Cost-Effectiveness Analysis

TL;DR

The paper introduces BCEA, an R package designed to facilitate comprehensive cost-effectiveness analyses in health economics, emphasizing Bayesian methods and uncertainty quantification.

Contribution

It provides a detailed description of the BCEA package, enabling advanced, customizable health economic analyses using Bayesian approaches and post-processing sampled data.

Findings

Supports Bayesian cost-effectiveness analysis with flexible outputs

Simplifies workflow for health economic modeling

Enhances uncertainty quantification in CEA

Abstract

We describe in detail how to perform health economic cost-effectiveness analyses (CEA) using the R package $\textbf{BCEA}$ (Bayesian Cost-Effectiveness Analysis). CEA consist of analytic approaches for combining costs and health consequences of intervention(s). These help to understand how much an intervention may cost (per unit of health gained) compared to an alternative intervention, such as a control or status quo. For resource allocation, a decision maker may wish to know if an intervention is cost saving, and if not then how much more would it cost to implement it compared to a less effective intervention. Current guidance for cost-effectiveness analyses advocates the quantification of uncertainties which can be represented by random samples obtained from a probability sensitivity analysis or, more efficiently, a Bayesian model. $\textbf{BCEA}$ can be used to post-process the sampled costs and health impacts to perform advanced analyses producing standardised and highly customisable outputs. We present the features of the package, including its many functions and their practical application. $\textbf{BCEA}$ is valuable for statisticians and practitioners working in the field of health economic modelling wanting to simplify and standardise their workflow, for example in the preparation of dossiers in support of marketing authorisation, or academic and scientific publications.