Joseph Kwon

I am a health economist at the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, having joined the department in January 2022. Since January 2024, I am Dementia Research Fellow sponsored by National Institute for Health and Care Research Applied Research Collaboration (NIHR ARC).

My main project for the fellowship is ‘Decision-making support model for whole-pathway dementia workforce commissioning’ (DEMM-COMM), with additional seed funding from Alzheimer’s Society. DEMM-COMM aims to develop a health economic model of dementia prevention, diagnosis and care which informs workforce commissioning decisions. This involves working with a variety of stakeholders and data sources (qualitative and quantitative) to conceptualise and parameterise the health economic model.

I am also participating in the Bio-Hermes Biomarker Data Challenge hosted by University of Glasgow, where our team is working to analyse the diagnostic and prognostic values of blood-based biomarkers of Alzheimer’s Disease.

I am the co-principal investigator for ‘Development of a PRISMA extension for systematic reviews of health economic evaluations’ (PRISMA-EconEval), funded by NIHR Research for Patient Benefit (RfPB). We aim to produce an extension of the widely used PRISMA guideline to systematic review that is tailored specifically to systematic reviews of health economic evaluations.

I have been involved in two further projects since joining the Department: (1) Tools to measure and value health change in children (TORCH); (2) Long covid multidisciplinary consortium: optimising treatments and services across the NHS (LOCOMOTION). I remain involved in these research areas. On childhood health outcomes, I am using Rasch analysis techniques to evaluate the psychometric properties of PedsQL. On Long COVID, I am interested in the ongoing health economic impacts of the disease and potential therapies in horizon.

My PhD was in Public Health, Economics and Decision Sciences at University of Sheffield. The thesis explored the methodological challenges around economic modelling of geriatric public health interventions, focusing on community-based falls prevention as a case study. Key challenges included incorporating capacity constraints, estimating the value of community asset involvement, and evaluating joint efficiency-equity impacts.