Making health economic models Shiny: A tutorial

Area of Science:

• Health economics
• Computational modeling
• Health services research

Background:

• Traditional health economic evaluation models are often built in Microsoft Excel.
• Increasing model complexity necessitates more sophisticated tools like R.
• R is popular among health economists due to its flexibility and extensive packages, but requires programming skills.

Purpose of the Study:

• To provide a tutorial on integrating health economic models developed in R into interactive web applications using the Shiny package.
• To address the challenge of R's lack of a user-friendly interface for non-programmers and improve communication of results.

Main Methods:

• The study utilizes the R programming language and its Shiny package.
• A four-state Markov model from the Decision Analysis in R for Technologies in Health (DARTH) group serves as a case study.
• The tutorial demonstrates wrapping an R-based health economic model into a Shiny application.

Main Results:

• Shiny enables the creation of interactive, web-based user interfaces for R-based health economic models.
• Users can easily adjust model parameters and conduct scenario analyses within the application.
• Complex models, such as Markov models, can be computed rapidly.

Conclusions:

• The R package Shiny offers a solution to bridge the gap between complex health economic modeling in R and user accessibility.
• Shiny applications facilitate direct communication of model results to decision-makers and stakeholders.
• This approach enhances the utility and dissemination of health economic evaluations.