Skip to main content
Health Updated September 2026

Comprehensive Health Economics and Economic Evaluation Training Programme

A six-day online certificate programme from 21 to 26 November 2026, with 24 sessions across four modules including four applied workshops, leading to the Certificate in Health Economics and Economic Evaluation.

Beginner
Last updated: September 2026

Course Description

Purpose and rationale
Decisions about which medicines to list, which services to fund and which technologies to adopt are taken every week in Saudi health institutions, and they are taken under a hard constraint: the budget is finite, and every commitment forecloses an alternative. This programme exists because those decisions are improved by a shared analytical language, one that makes the trade-offs explicit rather than leaving them implicit in a committee discussion.
The programme delivers an intensive, integrated curriculum in health economics and economic evaluation, directed at the practical work of decision-making, formulary management and policy development. It is designed for practitioners rather than for economists: the ambition is not to produce researchers who build models for a living, but to produce clinicians, pharmacists and administrators who can read a submitted economic dossier, identify where its argument is weak, and defend a recommendation on the record.
Upon successful completion, participants are awarded the Certificate in Health Economics and Economic Evaluation.
Who should attend
  • Hospital and clinical pharmacists involved in formulary review or medicines management.
  • Physicians who sit on, or advise, Pharmacy and Therapeutics or formulary committees.
  • Health policy analysts, HTA staff and reimbursement reviewers.
  • Health service administrators and budget holders responsible for technology adoption decisions.
  • Academic staff and postgraduate students in pharmacy, medicine and public health who require a working foundation in economic evaluation.
Groups are deliberately mixed by profession in every workshop. Much of the learning in the applied sessions comes from the collision between a clinical reading of the evidence and a budgetary one.
Prerequisites
No prior training in economics is assumed. Module 1 is the common entry point and builds the conceptual vocabulary from first principles.
Two practical prerequisites do apply. Participants should be comfortable reading a published clinical study, since Sessions 2.4 and 2.8 work directly from a protocol and a paper. And participants must have working familiarity with Microsoft Excel (entering formulae, referencing cells) for the guided model build in Session 4.4.
Delivery and schedule
The programme is delivered wholly online across six consecutive days, from Saturday 21 November to Thursday 26 November 2026. Each day comprises four contact hours, arranged as three lecture sessions and one applied workshop, giving 24 contact hours in total across 24 sessions. Modules 1 and 3 occupy a single day each; Modules 2 and 4, which carry the methodological and technical weight of the programme, occupy two days each.
  • Day 1, Saturday 21 November 2026: Module 1, Foundational Principles of Health Economics.
  • Day 2, Sunday 22 November 2026: Module 2, The Toolkit of Economic Evaluation (Part 1).
  • Day 3, Monday 23 November 2026: Module 2, The Toolkit of Economic Evaluation (Part 2).
  • Day 4, Tuesday 24 November 2026: Module 3, Advanced Applications in HTA and Policy.
  • Day 5, Wednesday 25 November 2026: Module 4, Applied Modelling and Evidence-Based Decision-Making (Part 1).
  • Day 6, Thursday 26 November 2026: Module 4, Applied Modelling and Evidence-Based Decision-Making (Part 2).
Daily timetable (Arabian Standard Time, GMT+3):
  • 16:00 to 16:10: Opening, recap of the previous day and statement of the day's objectives.
  • 16:10 to 17:00: Session A, lecture.
  • 17:15 to 18:05: Session B, lecture.
  • 18:25 to 19:15: Session C, lecture or case discussion.
  • 19:25 to 20:35: Session D, applied workshop in breakout groups followed by plenary report-back.
  • 20:35 to 20:45: Consolidation, Q&A and preview of the following day.
Faculty
  • Dr. Ziyad Almalki, Programme Director and Lead Facilitator: Module 1 (Day 1) and Module 4 (Days 5 and 6).
  • Dr. Saja Almazrou, Module Lead, Economic Evaluation Methods: Module 2 (Days 2 and 3).
  • Prof. Bander Balkhi, Module Lead, Health Policy, Insurance and HTA: Module 3 (Day 4).
Assessment
  • Critical appraisal (Session 2.8): 25%.
  • Mock formulary committee recommendation (Session 3.4): 25%.
  • Capstone policy brief (Session 4.8): 50%.
Daily knowledge checks, the Module 1 and Module 2 workshop outputs and the Excel model build are formative and carry no weight.
Certification
The Certificate in Health Economics and Economic Evaluation is awarded on satisfaction of all three of the following conditions:
  • Attendance at a minimum of five of the six programme days, and at a minimum of three of the four module workshops.
  • Submission of all three summative components: the critical appraisal (Session 2.8), the formulary committee recommendation (Session 3.4) and the capstone policy brief (Session 4.8).
  • A combined summative mark of 60% or above.

What You'll Learn

Apply the core economic concepts of scarcity, opportunity cost, efficiency and equity to resource-allocation decisions in clinical and formulary settings.
Explain the distinctive features and failures of healthcare markets, and articulate the economic rationale for regulation, financing and public provision.
Specify the structural elements of an economic evaluation (perspective, comparator, time horizon, discounting) and justify each choice for a given decision problem.
Identify, measure and value healthcare costs and health outcomes, including the construction and interpretation of the Quality-Adjusted Life Year (QALY).
Distinguish among cost-minimisation, cost-benefit, cost-effectiveness and cost-utility analysis, and calculate and interpret an Incremental Cost-Effectiveness Ratio (ICER) against a decision threshold.
Critically appraise a published economic evaluation using the CHEERS reporting standards and judge its validity and transferability to the local health system.
Construct and interpret simple decision-analytic models (decision trees, Markov models) and budget impact models, and characterise the uncertainty around their results.
Synthesise clinical, economic and value evidence into a defensible Health Technology Assessment or formulary recommendation, and communicate it clearly to non-technical decision makers.