PhD Completion – Michelle Tew

Congratulations to HEU’s PhD candidate, Michelle Tew, on completing her PhD thesis titled “Advancing economic evaluation methods for better medical decision making through real-world, longitudinal data” under the supervision of Associate Professor Kim Dalziel (primary supervisor), Professor Philip Clarke, Associate Professor Michelle Dowsey and Professor Karin Thursky.

Michelle’s thesis aims to demonstrate the usefulness and practicality of applying real-world, longitudinal data in health economics research and evaluations. It features six individual health economics studies which explore longitudinal data and show their value and contribution towards advancing economic evaluation methodologies and better decision making. Each of the studies answer specific research questions and contribute to the research literature through methodological research to improve consistency in extrapolating costs, utility inputs and modelling long-term outcomes, generating robust evidence for resource allocation decisions, promoting a better understanding of real-world heterogeneity and approaches to optimise patient outcomes. Collectively, these studies highlight important variations in the cost and outcomes of health care delivery in real-world settings, provide useful insights into the implications of such variations and demonstration of translating research findings to implementation. Further details and access to the thesis can be found here.

Selected publications from the thesis are as listed below.

Earlier this year, Michelle started on her post-doc role as a research fellow at the Health Economics Unit. Her work program involves conducting economic evaluations alongside clinical trials and evaluations of new health technologies including research from federal health economics and HTA panels. Michelle is also assigned a secondment position at the Department of Health Services Research at Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, providing health economics support to researchers across the organisations to meet the needs of both the hospital and research strategies.