A Toolkit for Health-economic Analysis with Language-Agnostic Simulation and Sensitivity Analysis (THALASSA)
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Background Cost-effectiveness analyses (CEA) built on simulation models are usually delivered through project-specific scripts. Each new model, and often each new question, rebuilds the same scaffolding: parameter management, calibration, base-case analysis, sensitivity analysis and export. This is costly, and is where traceability between an estimate and the model version producing it is lost. We present THALASSA, a web application providing this infrastructure once, for any model satisfying a small programming contract. Methods A simulation model is connected by one file implementing a fixed contract of R functions that determine its behaviour. THALASSA exposes the complete CEA workflow in a browser: a generated overview of the connected model, parameter editing, calibration, base-case comparison with the efficiency curve, and deterministic and probabilistic sensitivity analysis at a willingness-to-pay threshold, each with timestamped file export carrying the parameter values it was run with. Every session is bound to a repository version, so results carry their generating model version. Results We demonstrate THALASSA on two public models of contrasting difficulty: a simple tutorial model and a generic cancer screening model with two competing natural-history pathways and a 21-dimensional calibration deliberately built to be more complex. Both ran on the same unmodified setup, implementing the same contract, with no code changes. Conclusions Separating analysis infrastructure from model logic makes the CEA workflow reusable across projects and reproducible by construction. A modelling team can move from a versioned repository to audit-ready, exportable CEA outputs without writing analysis code. The integration effort does not grow with model size and one installation serves unrelated projects.
Source: medRxiv
Institutions: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Institut d'Investigació Biomédica de Bellvitge, Institut Català d'Oncologia, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, Centro de Investigación Biomédica en Red de Epidemiología y Salud Pública
Language: English
Subfield: Economics and Econometrics
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
Awards: G2064873908, Eliminación del cáncer del cuello uterino en España: análisis de coste-efectividad para la toma de decisiones sobre las estrategias de cribado óptimas en cohortes vacunadas frente el VPH, G2462415295, G257863076, G2619490452, G3005324705, G3546882995, G4424980551, G4749977292, G5195188938, G5470535847, G5598809341, G6656126374, G6704625968, G69051668, G7452058454, G7971421345, G8637226926, G8968964072
OpenAlex ID: W7223035298