prof. Ben van Hout, PhD

Professor Ben A van Hout, Ph.D. combines an appointment of professor of Medical Technology Assessment at the Julius Center for Health Sciences and Primary Care, Utrecht University with a position of scientific director of Pharmerit.

Prof van Hout has extensive experience in modeling and has contributed to the methodology of economic evaluation in various areas. In 1993 he was one of the earliest researchers to apply discrete event models and he was the first to apply a non-parametric method to estimate costs in the presence of censoring. In 1994 he was the first to apply Fieller’s approach to calculate confidence intervals around cost-effectiveness ratio’s and he introduced the acceptability curve, now a well known concept in cost effectiveness analysis. In 1996 he was one of the first to apply probabilistic sensitivity analysis. In 2000 he was one of the initial people to explore Bayesian techniques in economic evaluation. He has had work published on discounting, and estimating utility functions. He was one of the developers of the multi disease modeling approach that is now used by the Dutch government and the WHO. His experience covers several therapeutic areas, including renal disease, liver disease, cancer, osteoporosis, sepsis, depression and cardiovascular disease.

Prof van Hout has published in the Journal of Health Economics, Health Economics, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Lancet and a variety of other economic and medical journals. He co-authored the Dutch guidelines concerning costs calculations and pharmaco-economic studies.  He holds a PhD in health economics and a master's degree in econometrics, both from the Erasmus University in Rotterdam. He is one of the founding members of the EuroQol group. He was also first non-British person to be invited for a focus fortnight by the Centre of Health Economics and Bayesian statistics at the University of Sheffield.