Just need a break

Hello folks, today I would like to simply give a brief update about what I am looking for for next year, particularly in terms of conferences I am actuallu planning to attend as I think there is a couple that look very interesting. Unfortunately, I did not find the time to prepare something cool like the last few months with some applied examples on how to fit Bayesian models or how to implement some health economic analyses in R, but I promise I will make you forgive with the next update (a big one!). I have been so busy with lots of new beginning projects and supervision tasks the last few weeks that I barely had the time to do any research by myself. I have plenty of ideas to try but lack the time to do so. Well I guess I am used to this by now.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand. There are thre main conferences I am currently looking forward to attend next year at which present some on-going work I was involved with ovee the last few months.

• The first one is the annual lolaHESG 2024 which this year will take place in Leusden, a small town close to Amersfoort in the middle of the Netherlands. I know little to nothing about this location and I am curious to know why it was chosen for this year’s edition of lola. However, I am afraid this year I will not have the material time to attend this very nice health economics conference since I will be coordinating a new course which starts in May and have clashes with the actual dates of the conference. Unless I can find someone to replace me and even then, since this is my first year as coordinator of this course, I probably need to be present during the course in case any issues arise. Nevertheless, I would strongly suggest that you consider attending this conference if you are interested in current developments in the field of HTA and health economics from a broad perspective - usually there are many different topics and authors with a varied background experience. Plus, the conference event the last two years were a blast and super well organised, so I am sure also these years the organisers will nail it.

• The second one is the biannual EuHEA conference which in July 2024 will be held in Vienna. I attended the previous edition of the conference in Oslo and was a nice and well-organised conference which I really appreciated, particularly in terms of getting in touch with health economists spread all over the world who were working on such a diversity of projects. I believe the strength of these conferences is mainly the international environment of the audience and the generally constructive feedback presenting authors can receive from each other. They also plan each session in a way that ties up with the topics covered by the authors who present during the session, which is a nice way to ensure people with similar interests can interact with each other and potentially talk about future joint work. I am really considering submitting something to this conference, although I would be more inclided to submit materials for a workshop in R or BUGS/STAN as way to support my work (and also to motivate myself to start working on my R package!) and make it known to people who might benefit for using it in routine health economic analyses.

• Finally, there is also a quite special UK-based conference named ICTMC, which I already attended a few years back during my PhD, and which is more focussed on statistical methodology for the analysis of trial data. This upcoming year the conference will be held in October in Edinburgh and I would be really interested in presenting some new work I have been developing over the last few months in order to receive some feedback from statisticians and analysts. The conference has also specialised sessions to different “fields” within the general topic of trial data anlayses, with also a focus on health economic evaluations which I think would fit perfectly with my own work. It is still quite early to apply for this conference but I would be really interested in attending such conference and share my work with other experts to receive some nice feedback and suggestions for improvement.

As I said, today I wanted to be short and simply give an update of my current situation with a focus on the type of conferences I am looking forward to attend in 2024. Despite the focus of my work being strongly connected to HTA and missing data analyses, I feel that the applicability of the methods I am developing could become beneficial to other quantitative researchers who may be involved in a different types of data analysis which share similar characteristics to those of trial-based economic evaluations. In addition, we all know that missing data problems will never go away and therefore I hoop I can provide some suggestions or nice feedback to anyone who would be interested to learn how to deal with them without using standard and well-known problematic methods.

Yes I am talking about you, dear complete-case anlaysis statistician!

Wish you all a merry Christams and a happy new year !