MDS Europe - University of York

University of York

The University of York (UoY) is ranked in the top 100 universities in the world. From a UK perspective, it is placed within the top 10 for research and has recently become a member of the elite Russell Group of universities. UoY comprises over 30 academic departments and research centres and, of those participating in the MDS-RIGHT, the Department of Health Sciences (DoHS) and the Centre for Health Economics (CHE) were ranked 1st in the country for the quality of their health services research based on the most recent research assessment exercise.

The Epidemiology and Cancer Statistics Group (ECSG) is one of the largest research units in DoHS both in terms of numbers of staff and annual income comprising almost 40 members of staff including epidemiologists, statisticians, health economists, web-developers and programmers. A major part of ECSG’s work is concerned with the collection of high-quality information for the provision of robust generalisable data to inform clinical practice and research on the incidence, prevalence and outcome for haematological malignancies. The Haematological Malignancy Research Network (www.hmrn.org) established in 2004, represents ECSG’s main research activity and is a population based cohort study collecting prognostic, treatment and outcome data from primary sources (primarily medical records and results direct from the histopathology laboratory) on over 2,200 patients each year. ECSG has considerable experience in handling and analysing data from medical records and this information is currently being used for descriptive purposes, to construct prognostic models and also for mapping and costing of treatment pathways.

The Centre for Health Economics (CHE) has been a successful research centre for 30 years, and is one of the world’s first research institutes dedicated to the study of the economics of health and health care. CHE attaches high importance to scientific quality. Its researchers play a leading role in many national and international societies, and are regularly invited to make high-profile presentations at scientific meetings across the world. Staff publish in the leading international journals in their field, and its research has a very strong policy impact both nationally and internationally. Within the UK, examples include work at the most senior level with policy formulation in The Department of Health and its devolved equivalents, HM Treasury, The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, The Cabinet Office, and The Home Office. Internationally, its researchers have worked at a senior level with many national ministries and health care agencies, in countries in every continent, and with international organisations including the World Health Organization, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Our team

Prof. Andrea Manca

Andrea is Professor of Health Economics in the Team for Economic Evaluation and Health Technology Assessment, part of the Centre for Health Economics. He is co-editor of the journals Value in Health and PLOS One. Andrea’s research interests focus on the application of statistical methods for the analysis of cost-effectiveness and health outcomes data, as well as the use of evidence synthesis techniques for healthcare decision making. He has evaluated health technologies in several clinical areas including breast and advanced colorectal cancer, endovascular aneurysm repair, coronary revascularisation, diabetes, neck and chronic low back pain, surgical interventions for urinary stress incontinence, and hysterectomy.

Dr. Alexandra Smith

Alex is a senior research fellow in epidemiology (MPhil Epidemiology, University of Cambridge; PhD, University of Leeds). She joined her current research group in 1997, which moved to the University of York in 2004. Since 1997, her research has focussed on haematological malignancies and she is the epidemiologist with day-to-day management responsibility for the group’s main project, the Haematological Malignancy Research Network (HMRN). She has considerable experience and expertise in establishing and running large population-based observational studies covering all aspects including data management and analysis. She has been involved in the EUMDS registry since its inception in 2007 and has overseen all aspects of data-management and analyses for the project including the design and building of the web-based database.

In MDS-RIGHT, she will continue in this analytical role, supporting data requirements across all work packages as well as chairing the taskforce responsible for developing and producing the MDS-EUROPE website.

Dr. Simon Crouch

Simon is a senior research fellow in biostatistics (MA & MMath Mathematics, University of Cambridge; PhD Mathematics, University of Warwick, MSc Medical Statistics, University of Lancaster). He joined the Epidemiology and Cancer Statistics Group (ECSG) at the University of York in 2006. His research focusses on stochastic modelling techniques applied to the epidemiology of haematological malignancies; especially to the development of prognostic models. He leads the analytics group within ECSG.

Dr. Cynthia Iglesias

Cynthia is senior health economist/ health services researcher at the University of York. She has a first degree in Actuary from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, a MSc in Health Economics and a PhD in Health Sciences, both from the University of York. Cynthia is based at the Department of Health Sciences, and has had honorary appointments with the Hull York Medical School and the Centre for Health Economics, where she is now an internal affiliate. Economic evaluation of healthcare technologies, its contribution to healthcare policy decision making and Bayesian statistical methods for economic evaluation are Cynthia's main areas of interest. In 2008, she started a personal fellowship awarded by the Medical Research Council to look at the potential contribution of Bayesian methods for evidence synthesis to the evaluation of therapeutic medical devices.

Dr. Thomas Patton

Thomas is a Research Fellow with the Team for Economic Evaluation and Health Technology Assessment (TEEHTA). His research focuses on methodological issues in the analysis of health-related quality of life data. Before joining the Centre for Health Economics, Thomas spent two years working at the York Health Economics Consortium. He holds a degree in Economics from Newcastle University (2008) and an Msc in Health Economics from the University of York (2009), and has worked at the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) on a summer placement.

Dan Painter

Dan is a biochemist (University of York, 2014) and has worked with ECSG as an analyst and researcher for 10 years. He has experience as a laboratory scientist and specialises in analysis and management of complex data; he takes responsibility for the design, programming and maintenance of databases and data access systems for a number of ECSG’s studies

His role in MDS-RIGHT is the development and programming of interactive treatment guideline tools.

John Painter-Blase

John is an educational technologist (MA Online and Distance Education, Open University) with a background in biology (BSc, University of York) and a decade of experience in the production of high quality scientific and educational online material. He has been involved in the EUMDS Registry in a technical, design and support capacity since its inception.

His role in MDS RIGHT is the design of the MDS EUROPE website and promotional materials, production of site content and web support.

William Curson

William is a web developer/ systems integrator in ECSG, with training in Internet Computing (BSc, University of Hull) and extensive experience in web design and software development. He has been heavily involved in the development of all of ECSG's study websites, in-house software and web-hosted databases (including the EUMDS Registry database) as well as providing technical support to external users of these platforms.

In MDS RIGHT, he is solely responsible for the coding and development of the MDS EUROPE web platform and its associated web content management system.

James Doughty

James has worked as a Systems Analyst with ECSG since 2000. He is responsible for developing software solutions for ECSG’s research requirements as well as creating and maintaining centralised databases for a number of large studies. He designed, developed and maintains the web-based database for the EUMDS Registry, used by study staff in the 142 centres across 17 European countries.

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