Felix Achana

I am a senior researcher in health economics at the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences. With research interest spanning the interface between medical statistics and health technology assessment (HTA), my expertise is in generating quantitative insights and solutions to support the HTA process. This includes the analysis of complex datasets, mixed treatment comparison meta-analysis, survival analysis and cost-effectiveness modelling.

Between 2014 and 2019, I worked as a research fellow and senior research fellow in health economics and health technology assessment at Warwick Medical School. My work here included an economic evaluation alongside a randomised controlled trial in orthopaedic surgery that has been published in The Lancet. I lead the economic modelling that informed the recently published National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) guidance on point-of-care testing for group A Streptococcal sore throat infection in primary and secondary urgent care settings. 

I am proficient in using the statistical programming language R for data analysis and visualisation, and WinBUGS for Bayesian analysis, including using these tools to build economic models from scratch that have informed national policy and guidance.

I have published methodological and applied research on the synthesis of evidence from diverse sources in leading journals such as Statistics in Medicine, Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, BMC Medical Research Methodology and Diabetologia. I co-authored the NICE Decision Support Unit (DSU) Technical Support Document (TSD) on multivariate meta-analysis and surrogate outcome modelling. This document is the national reference standard used by organisations such as NICE for conducting these methods, demonstrating the impact of my research on UK policy decision-making process.