CHERMID is led by Prof. Philippe Beutels.
CHERMID has played an important role in advancing the field of health economics with respect to the evaluation of infectious disease prevention, uncertainty analyses, and dynamic models including data collection and estimating parameters for such models. CHERMID is by nature multidisciplinary, currently employing 8 researchers with various (often multiple) backgrounds (economics, medicine, mathematics, statistics, philosophy, informatics, physics, biology and bioengineering). The demand for sophisticated mathematical models is very high both nationally and internationally, and all the more so since these models are becoming increasingly essential tools for public health policy. CHERMID has a longstanding productive collaboration with the Centre for Statistics (CENSTAT) at the University of Hasselt on developing and applying novel mathematical and statistical methods to our research questions. This collaboration is exemplified by the joint appointment of Prof Niel Hens at CENSTAT and CHERMID.
CHERMID continues to expand its research portfolio, with further development of basic research in which intra-host mechanisms of cellular and humoral immunity as well as optimizing individual based models are increasingly important themes. CHERMID also undertakes research into public preferences for prioritization in health care, and the ethical implications of various approaches to account for these preferences in decision making.
The applied analyses of CHERMID cover a wide range of infectious diseases, amongst which varicella-zoster virus, seasonal and pandemic influenza virus, rotavirus, pneumococcus, hepatitis A virus, hepatitis B virus, human papillomavirus, pertussis, measles virus, mumps virus and dengue virus. CHERMID also conducts research on the determinants of medical consumption, focusing on antibiotics and its impact on antibiotic resistance, and the relationship between generic and brand name drug consumption for common medications.
Available Expertise:
Health economics: methods and applications
• Health economic evaluation
• Quality Adjusted Life Year research
• ethical basis for policy: efficiency versus equity and autonomy
• Market mechanisms for pharmaceutical consumption
Mathematical modelling: methods and applications
• Infectious Disease transmission between hosts
• Immunological processes within hosts
• Deterministic dynamic models with demographic forecasting
• Stochastic individual based models
Biostatistics: methods and applications
• Statistical and mathematical infectious disease epidemiology
• Data mining
• Longitudinal data analysis
MCMC parameter estimation