R for trial and model-based cost-effectiveness analysis
We are excited to announce the R for Health Technology Assessment (HTA) workshop that will be held on Monday 22nd June, Tuesday 23rd June & Wednesday 24th June 2026.
Monday 22nd June will be in-person day-long hybrid event hosted by the University of Exeter, while other days will be online only (Zoom link provided on booking). Our program will be announced in April. The overall goal is to present interesting and enlightening presentations on the use of R that will engage an audience of those working in the field of health technology assessment and related analysis. Sessions may cover some or all of the following:
- New methods and applications for economic modelling using R
- Efficient modelling for economic evaluation using dedicated R packages
- Improving modelling for HTA using R – Lessons from industry and academia
- Teaching economic evaluation and HTA using R
The in person day will be held at
University of Exeter, St Luke’s Campus, Heavitree Road, Exeter EX1 2LU
More information on travel can be found here and accommodation here.
For any questions before the day, contact the team at RHTAExeter@exeter.ac.uk.
The call for abstracts is not restricted by topic.
Registration for the workshop can be made at this webpage. Please note that we can only accept payments via card.
The registration fee is structured as follows
| Attendance type | Standard price | LMIC and students discount* |
|---|---|---|
| Online only (22nd, 23rd & 24th June 2026) | £50 | £10 |
| In person (22nd June) and online (23rd & 24th June 2026) | £90 | £65 |
NB: LMIC relates to country of residence/occupation and not origin. When registering, you will be asked to give details of your student status or country of occupation.
Registration for the workshop is now open through the UCL Online Store
We look forward to seeing you there!
Full programme
Day 1. Monday 22nd June 2026 (In person and Remote)
| Session | Name | Institution | Title |
|---|---|---|---|
| 11:00-11:10 | Dawn Lee | PenTAG, University of Exeter | Welcome |
| 11:10-11:30 | Edna Keeney / Carolina Heuser | Clifton Insight / Roche | RforCEM - A comprehensive and user-friendly cost-effectiveness model template in the R programming language |
| 11:30-11:50 | Alex Mclean | Costello Medical | An Excel and R Hybrid Patient Simulation Model: Utilising Parallel Core Processing and Vectored Simulations for HTA Ready CEMs |
| 11:50-12:10 | Darren Burns | Dark Peak Analytics | treatseqr: A Matrix Based Framework for Scalable Treatment Sequencing in HTA |
| 12:10-13:10 | Lunch | ||
| 13:10-13:30 | Michael O’Donnell | University of Bristol | Is your code fast enough? |
| 13:30-13:50 | Aaron Gorman | Public Health Agency | Northern Ireland, a Population Health Model: A Microsimulation in R for Long Term Chronic Non - Communicable Conditions |
| 13:50-14:10 | Eva Li | University of Bristol | A discrete event simulation model to assess treatment sequences in rheumatoid arthritis in a Chinese population, accounting for heterogeneity |
| 14:10-14:40 | Break | ||
| 14:40-15:00 | Oliver Dolin / Lewis Ralph | Dark Peak Analytics / Roche | Care Closer to Home: An Open-Source R Framework for Geospatial Health Technology Assessment and Service Optimisation |
| 15:00-15:20 | Liza Zasukhina | MSD | Agentic health economic modelling made auditable with YAML and open-source R packages |
| 15:20-15:40 | Alfredo Mariani | Takeda | COSTmos: A universe of cost resources for HTA in the UK within a practical R package and Shiny dashboard |
| 15:40-16:10 | Break | ||
| 16:10-16:50 | Gabriel Rogers / Catherine McGuire | Manchester Centre for Health Economics / U of Manchester Research Software Engineering | R Mutual Friend: Interdisciplinary collaboration between health economists and research software engineers to deliver a complex HTA project |
| 16:50-17:00 | Howard Thom | Closing remarks |
Day 2. Tuesday 23rd June 2026 (Remote)
| Session | Name | Institution | Title |
|---|---|---|---|
| 12:30-12:40 | Raquel Aguiar-Ibanez | Welcome | |
| 12:40-13:00 | Javier Sanchez Alvarez | Value Analytics Centre | 20,000 Leagues Under R: A Journey of Transformation into a Resource-Constrained DES Package |
| 13:00-13:20 | Lucy Watson | Dark Peak Analytics | Scaling Expert Elicitation with an R-powered Platform |
| 13:20-13:40 | Nyasha Manyeruke | African Centre of Excellence for Population Health and Policy | Scaling open source spatial monitoring of maternal deaths with R Shiny: evidence from Kano State, Nigeria |
| 13:40-14:00 | Xavier Pouwels | University of Twente | Developing the CHecklist for Assessing Open Source Health Economic Models (CHAOS) |
| 14:00-14:15 | Break | ||
| 14:15-14:35 | Ahmad Sofi-Mahmudi | Thermo Fisher Scientific | mlumr: An R Package for Conducting Indirect Comparisons with Multilevel Unanchored Meta-Regression |
| 14:35-14:55 | Mary Ward | University of Bristol | Discrete event simulation model in R for the optimal testing for routine monitoring in chronic conditions |
| 14:55-15:15 | Hawre Jalal | University of Ottawa | Twig: A Computationally Efficient and Fully Vectorized Approach to Time-Dependent Markov Modeling in R |
| 15:15-15:35 | Petros Pechlivanoglou | The Hospital for Sick Children, Canada | Improving computational efficiency in discrete-time microsimulation models in R and Python |
| 15:35-15:50 | Break | ||
| 15:50-16:10 | Rafael Miranda | Canada’s Drug Agency | A Shiny-Based App to Automate the Construction of Cost Comparison Tables |
| 16:10-17:00 | Panel Session | Baris Deniz (AIde Solutions), Ian Cromwell (Independent), Tom Monks (University of Exeter), Rob Hettle (AstraZeneca) | Using R to leverage the power of gen AI in HTA |
| 17:00-17:10 | Dominic Muston | Closing remarks |
Day 3. Wednesday 24th June 2026 (Remote)
| Session | Name | Institution | Title |
|---|---|---|---|
| 09:00-09:10 | Lea Trela-Larsen | Welcome | |
| 09:10-09:30 | Simon Smart | University of Leicester | MetaInsight v7: Making a Comprehensive Web App for Network Meta-analysis Reproducible |
| 09:30-09:50 | Akansha Sharma | Heorlytics | drMAIC: A Doubly Robust R Package for Reproducible Matching-Adjusted Indirect Comparisons in HTA |
| 09:50-10:10 | Shubhram Pandey | Heorlytics | seerSurv An R Package for Deriving Post Recurrence Transition Probabilities in Oncology Economic Models |
| 10:10-10:30 | Heather Riley | York Health Economics Consortium | Integrating a Python-Based Stochastic Household COVID-19 Transmission Model into an R Shiny Cost-Effectiveness Platform via reticulate |
| 10:30-10:45 | Break | ||
| 10:45-11:05 | Pranshu Mundada | University of Warwick | Working with an Discrete Event Simulation in R: Validation, Modification and Output Extraction for a National Breast Cancer Screening Policy Question |
| 11:05-11:25 | Robert Smith / Yevgeniy Samyshkin | Dark Peak Analytics / GSK | Building & Scaling Custom HEOR Modelling Software within Industry |
| 11:25-11:45 | Lindsay Claxton | NICE | Experience of R models in HTA: a NICE perspective |
| 11:45-12:05 | Jesus Rodriguez Perez | Dark Peak Analytics | hotShiny: an open-source package for fast Shiny app development in R |
| 12:05-12:20 | Break | ||
| 12:20-12:40 | Bariz Denis | Aide Solutions LLC | A Decomposition Framework for Translating Published Health Economic Model Descriptions into Executable R Code Using Agentic AI |
| 12:40-13:00 | Rose Hart | Covalence Research | Multimodal Network-Based Geospatial Modelling with the r5r Package: A MASLD Case Study in England |
| 13:00-13:10 | Robert Smith | Closing remarks |
