Dr Koen Degeling joined the Cancer Health Services Research unit as a Research Fellow in July 2019. As a trained Operations Researcher specialized in Healthcare Technology and Management, he developed an interest in health economics and started researching the use of advanced simulation techniques for modelling health and economic outcomes of personalized clinical pathways. This resulted in his PhD thesis ‘Simulation Modeling to Optimize Personalized Oncology’ (available for download here), which provides practical and methodological guidance essential to the adoption of patient-level simulation techniques within health economics and health services research.
Within the Cancer Health Services Research unit, Koen focuses on the use of simulation models to evaluate and optimize clinical pathways and improve patient outcomes. He has a particular interest in the use of real-world data from clinical registries to inform simulations. Additionally, Koen is involved in several research projects using clinical registry data for comparative effectiveness research, including the use of observational data to simulate synthetic control arms to single-arm trials, and to estimate the real-world health economic impact of healthcare interventions.
Koen is mainly involved in multidisciplinary research projects focussing on localised and metastatic colorectal cancer and localised prostate cancer, but he also collaborates on projects related to pancreatic cancer, haematological diseases, and complex sequencing. He presented on collaborative work using the Treatment of Advanced Colorectal Cancer (TRACC) registry as part of the University of Melbourne Centre for Cancer Research (UMCCR) seminar series (recording publicly available here).
He has been actively involved within the Professional Society for Health Economics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR, website). His absolute highlight was chairing the ISPOR Student Network, representing approximately 5,000 students and over 120 chapters globally. In 2020, he initiated and was the founding Faculty Advisor for the ISPOR Victoria and Tasmania Student Chapter, which is a unique cross-institutional collaboration between the University of Melbourne, Monash University, Deakin University, and the University of Tasmania. In terms of research, Koen has contributed to international conferences of ISPOR and other societies as short course and workshop faculty.