ABSTRACT
Models built for pharmacoeconomic evaluations are still being designed in a multitude of ways, largely depending on the modeling team and the chosen software. Since the previous edition of this book, a new modeling approach has been developed with the purpose of overcoming some of the limitations and shortcomings of the current methods. discretely integrated condition event (DICE) simulation transparently unifies the common modeling techniques, thus making it possible to create survival partition, cohort, and individual Markov as well as unconstrained discrete event simulation models in a single framework. It relies on two concepts: a condition is any item of information considered in the model and an event is a point during execution where at least one condition is modified. The model is fully specified by the list of conditions, including the list of special output conditions, the list of events, and the lists of consequences of each event. To comply with the requests of authorities, these lists are tabulated in Microsoft Excel® while the execution engine (the macro that runs through the events) is generic and common to all models.
