Pharmacoepidemiology & Pharmacoeconomics

Pharmacy, 8th semester · every summer semester · block seminar, 2 hours per week per semester (SWS) · examination subject in the Second State Examination in Pharmacy

The seminar has three parts: pharmacoepidemiology, infectious disease epidemiology and pharmacoeconomics. Pharmacoepidemiology deals with measures of disease frequency, risk comparisons and the question of which study design can answer which question. The part on infectious disease epidemiology covers the reproduction number, outbreak investigation, surveillance and vaccination. In pharmacoeconomics, students learn how the costs and benefits of drugs are compared and how the early benefit assessment under AMNOG works. Students calculate many measures themselves, work with public health data and explore spread scenarios in two simulators developed by our group. In the exercises they analyse an IQWiG benefit assessment and compare the costs of different therapies using an example.

Topics

  • Measures of disease frequency: prevalence, incidence, age standardisation
  • Risk comparisons: relative risk, odds ratio, NNT and NNH, attributable risk
  • Study designs: ecological, cross-sectional, case-control and cohort studies, randomised trials
  • Random error, bias and confounding
  • Pharmacovigilance, signal detection and typical biases in routine data
  • Infection dynamics: reproduction number, SIR and SEIR models, herd immunity
  • Outbreak investigation, surveillance and notification under the German Infection Protection Act
  • Prevention and vaccination, including in pharmacies
  • Cost categories and types of analysis: cost-minimisation, cost-effectiveness, cost-utility, cost-benefit
  • Quality of life, decision models (decision tree, Markov) and early benefit assessment under AMNOG

Links and dates

Dates and rooms are listed in the course catalogue (LSF).