My name is Ian, I’m from Vancouver, Canada (on the unceded territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations).
- BSc Hons., Health Studies and Gerontology, Waterloo (2007); MSc., Epidemiology, Queen’s (2009); PhD, Population and Public Health, UBC (2019)
- Health Economist, ARCC (2009-2020)
- Health Economics Manager, CADTH (2020-Present)
I got into health economics with the aim of safeguarding the long-term viability of the Canadian health care system. I got into R because I found Excel and TreeAge to be clunky (and expensive, in the case of the latter). I got into blogging about R because I found most of the guides were pretty unfriendly to novices.
Most of my coding knowledge was mentored by Stavros Korokithakis of Stochastic Technologies. If you’re ever impressed with anything I’ve written, chances are that Stavros can take a huge chunk of the credit.
If you have any questions, comments, or corrections about anything you see on the site please feel free to e-mail me.
About This Site
This blog is here to collect my random thoughts, ideas, and tinkerings as I develop R-based tools for doing things in health economics. I hope to eventually start describing my Python-based work as well.
The intended audience for this work is researchers, trainees, and others who are interested in cost-effectiveness model building but do not have a background in R or much coding experience at all. I will try to avoid jargon and give detailed explanations of what I’m doing.
Are you brand new to R? The best place to start is with my Guide to Health State Transition Model Building in R.
I built this site using Beautiful Jekyll which was a super easy way to set it up (especially if you already have a GitHub). Rave reviews for making this process simple for me. Would definitely recommend.