James O Mahony

Biography

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. Following his master's studies he worked at Goodbody Economic Consultants in Dublin, then a subsidiary of Goodbody Stockbrokers. His work at Goodbody's involved research for both public and private sector clients. While he found the consulting role interesting, he was keen to gain a sector specialty. Seeing health economics as a growing field with a large public policy element he decided to return to academics. James was awarded a Health Economics Fellowship by Ireland's Health Research Board (HRB). 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 now works at Trinity College Dublin as a postdoctoral researcher on the CERVIVA cervical cancer screening grant and is supported by a HRB Interdisciplinary Capacity Enhancement (ICE) award. He works in collaboration with clinical research specialists from Trinity's Department of Histopathology at the Coombe Hospital, Dublin.

Research Interest

Dr O Mahonys 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. Differential discounting of cost and health effects leads to examples of models with heterogeneous cohorts. James is also interested in the representation of uncertainty to decision makers, particularly probabilistic sensitivity analysis and cost-effectiveness acceptability curves.