Dr. James O'Mahony

Dr O'Mahony holds a BA in economics and philosophy from Trinity College Dublin, an MA in economics from University College Dublin and a PhD from Trinity College Dublin. He has always been interested in the way that economics influences public policy and has worked in the field of health economics since 2008. James was awarded a Health Economics Fellowship by Ireland's Health Research Board (HRB) and he undertook a PhD on the cost-effectiveness of cancer screening. During his doctoral research James spent two years at the Department of Public Health at the Erasmus Medical Centre at Rotterdam, the Netherlands. During his time there James worked with the MISCAN microsimulation model of cancer prevention. His thesis concerned methodological questions in cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA), primarily relating to the fit of CEA models to policy questions. James spent the final year of his PhD studies working as an intern at the Health Information and Quality Authority (HIQA), where he contributed to both the organisation's Budget Impact Analysis (BIA) guidelines and to a CEA of breast screening for women of above average risk of disease. James is a Research Assistant Professor at the Centre for Health Policy and Management at Trinity College Dublin. He is employed under an Emerging Investigator Award, funded by the Health Research Board. His research retains a focus on CEA methods in cancer screening but also includes work on the cost-effectiveness threshold and CEA methods more broadly. James has close research links with collaborators internationally and is a member of several international research consortia. He is a member of the editorial board of the journal PharmacoEconomics and is an active reviewer for other journals. He teaches on a number of courses including the HRB-sponsored Stuctured Population and Health-Sevices Research Education (SPHeRE) programme. He also provides PhD supervision to doctoral, masters level and undergraduate students. James is a member of Ireland's National Screening Advisory Committee convened following the Scally Report in response to the CervicalCheck controversy.

  Cancer Screening   HEALTH ECONOMICS   ORGANISED CERVICAL CANCER SCREENING

Dr O'Mahony's primary research interests are in methods of cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA), particularly modelling methods. Most broadly, James is interested in the way the policy questions faced by decision makers are interpreted by analysts when constructing models and communicating results back to decision makers. He is interested in how well the model estimates provided to decision makers fit the policy questions at hand. One of the areas of interest for James where models may not fit with policy questions is where there are multiple heterogeneous cohorts that are potential recipients of a given intervention. Cohort heterogeneity can arise for many reasons, including risk stratification or differential discounting, both of which have been subject of James's research. James is also interested in the methods used to determine and apply cost-effectiveness thresholds. His research has addressed the cost-effectiveness threshold in Ireland and to the extent it breached and fails to correspond with opportunity costs in the health system. Related to this, James is interested in the transparency of health systems regarding the resource allocation choices decision makers choose. Similarly, he is interested in appraisal frameworks that depart from the standard assumption that everyone's health is valued equally. James has an interest in technical aspects of cost-effectiveness analysis, including simulation methods. He enjoys working in R and operates a basic discrete event microsimulation for the purposes of methods demonstration.