Research interests

I am interested in the measurement and valuation of health in the context of health economic evaluations. More specifically, I am studying normative aspects of the aggregation of individual health state preferences into a social preference. For my research, I draw on methods and perspectives from various fields, combining health economics and cost-effectiveness modelling with ideas from game, social choice, and democratic theory.

Apart from this, I have wide-reaching research interests in open science, health inequalities, the use of R and R Shiny for efficient and transparent decision modeling, and the generation of actionable evidence from real-world data. I like learning new things and I am happy to collaborate on interdisciplinary research projects.

My PhD Research

 

Title: Individual and social health state preferences: theoretical and methodological advances in the valuation of health

Supervisors: Ben van Hout and John Brazier


OPUF - Online Elicitation of Personal Utility Functions

The OPUF method is a new approach for estimating value sets for the EQ-5D-5L (or any other PROM), using compositional preference elicitation techniques. In contrast to conventional methods (DCE, TTO, etc), it does not need hundreds of participants to derive a social value set, and it even allows the construction of preference functions on the individual level.
iHEA webinar iHEA presentation slides SMDM Poster Methods paper / preprint EQ-5D-5L OPUF UK working paper

On the unethical implications of ‘States Worse Than Dead’

Assigning negative values to ‘States Worse Than Dead’ and using them in economic evaluations to value the changes in individuals’ survival times implies unethical value judgements. In this paper I argue that a non-negative value should be assigned to all human lives.
The QALY is ableist (On the unethical implications of SWD)

This project is concerned with the interpersonal (in)comparability of (TTO) health state utilities. Inspired the concept of relative utilitarinism, a new multi-step utility aggregation procedure is proposed. The method is tested using EQ-5D 3L data from the UK and compared against the traditional social value set.
Setting dead (not) to zero HESG discussion paper (Theory) EuroQol discussion paper (Application) Data (EQ-5D 3L) and R code repo

In this paper I argue that the valuation of health states should not be understood as merely a statistical exercise, but as major instrument of democratic participation. Alternative, more democratic decision rules and methods to derive social value sets are explored.
Publication

R and R Shiny for HTA


SADM-MK2

A lean and fast Shiny app for a time-dependant Markov model (1,000 PSA iterations in 4 sec)

WHO - Cost of FGM

Shiny App for projecting the costs of FGM

Making health economic models shiny

Creating interactive user interfaces for health economic models developed in R

Making health economic models shiny - Github Repo

Open source code repository

Speedy 5S Markov

Demo of a fast 5-State Markov Model + a simple shiny app

hervis

Taking model outputs from MS Excel and create fancy figures in R / ggplot2

Intro to R online course web page (#R4ScHARR)

A short interactive intro to R

Modelling and Shiny in R online course

Course material

Other Projects

A study of the social and geographic disparities in the access to and the participation in parkrun events in England. Outputs form this project include a location-allocation analysis to identify optimal locations for future events and an interactive online map.
Optimising participation Interactive map (#Rshiny) Code & data repo Poster (#EPH2019) Ethnic density & participation longitudinal study 2010 to 2019 blog post

A simulation study to assess the performance of the Pareto Frontier approach for model calibration against a conventional distance-based (unweighted) sum score.
SMDM poster github repo

A case study of digital epidemiology. We used flu-related search query data from Google Trends and statistical learning techniques to monitor the 2017 /18 influence epidemic in the Netherlands in near real-time. Source code and data, as well as a step-by-step tutorial are provided.
More details Pre-Print Code & data repo Conference poster (#WEON2018) R tutorial

Exploring (latent) cost trajectories in patients with advanced breast cancer in the Netherlands during the last year of life, using group-based trajectory modelling and real world-data from a regional cancer registry.
OA Paper (#PLOSONE) latent traj modeling in R Conference poster (#ISPOREurope) poster abstract (ViH)

A R tutorial on how to access your personal fitbit data and analyse your sleeping patterns.
R Tutorial

Staffing and the quality of care in German hospitals

This study investigates the association between staffing (nurses and physicians) and the incidence of hospital-acquired pressure ulcers in acute care hospitals in Germany.
Journal Article Dissertation (in German) Conference poster (#DGSMP2016 - in German)

Publications

–> Go to Google Scholar Profile

Working papers

  • Schneider P, van Hout B, Heisen M, Devlin N, Brazier J. The Online Elicitation of Personal Utility Functions (OPUF) tool: a new method for valuing health states. Wellcome Open Research, (coming soon)

  • Schneider PP, van Hout B, Devlin N, Brazier J. Not just another EQ-5D-5L value set for the UK: using the ‘OPUF’ approach to study health preferences on the societal-, group-, and individual person-level. 2021. Working paper

  • Schneider PP. Setting Dead at Zero? On the contingency of the utility unit scale. 2020. Working paper

  • Schneider PP, van Hout B, Brazier J. Fair interpersonal utility comparison in the context of health valuation studies: early results of a new multi-step preference aggregation procedure. 2020. EuroQol ECR discussion paper

  • Schneider PP. Interpersonal comparability of health state utilities: why it is unfair to measure preferences in units of full-health-time, and what we can do about it. 2019. HESG discussion paper