Acute and critical care

Program Lead

Dr Lisa Higgins provides her wealth of experience, gained over 15 years with our School’s Australian and New Zealand Intensive Care Research Centre. Her research focuses on evaluating the costs of care in critical illness and conducting economic evaluations alongside clinical trials in critical care.

She works with us to:

  • Promote the inclusion of economic analyses in intensive care clinical trials
  • Develop standard methodology for economic evaluation alongside intensive care trials
  • Develop methods to efficiently collect resource use data in trial cohorts (including data linkage for post-hospital healthcare resource use and the addition of resource use data points into existing intensive care (and other) databases)
  • Develop standardised costings for use in intensive care economic evaluations
  • Provide opportunities for mentoring and for health economics training relevant to critical care.

Recent highlights

Higgins AM, Peake SL, Bellomo R, et al. The cost-effectiveness of early goal directed therapy: an economic evaluation alongside the ARISE trial. Critical Care and Resuscitation. 2021 23(3):329-336. doi: 10.51893/2021.3.oa10.

McQuilten ZK*, Higgins AM*, Burns K, Chunilal S, Dunstan T, Haysom HE, Kaplan Z, Rushford K, Saxby K, Tahiri R, Waters N, Wood EM. The cost of blood: a study of the total cost of red blood cell transfusion in patients with β-thalassemia using time-driven activity-based costing. Transfusion. 2019 Nov;59(11):3386-3395. doi: 10.1111/trf.15558. (*co-first authors)

Irving A, Higgins A, Ady B, Bellomo R, Cooper DJ, French C, Gantner D, Harris A, Irving DO, Murray L, Nichol A, Petrie D, McQuilten ZK. Fresh Red Cells for Transfusion in Critically Ill Adults: An Economic Evaluation of the Standard Issue Transfusion Versus Fresher Red-Cell Use in Intensive Care (TRANSFUSE) Clinical Trial. Critical Care Medicine. 2019 Jul;47(7):e572-e579. doi: 10.1097/CCM.0000000000003781.

Knott RJ, Harris A, Higgins A, Nichol A, French C, Little L, Haddad S, Presneill J, Arabi Y, Bailey M, Cooper DJ, Duranteau J, Huet O, Mak A, McArthur C, Pettilä V, Skrifvars MB, Vallance S, Varma D, Wills J, Bellomo R. Cost-Effectiveness of Erythropoietin in Traumatic Brain Injury: A Multinational Trial-Based Economic Analysis. Journal of Neurotrauma. 2019 Sep 1;36(17):2541-2548. doi: 10.1089/neu.2018.6229.

Taylor CB, Thompson KJ, Hodgson C, Liew C, Litton E, McGain F, Nichol A, Rauniyar R, Ridley E, Higgins A. Economic evaluations for intensive care unit randomised clinical trials in Australia and New Zealand: Practical recommendations for researchers. Australian Critical Care. 2023 May;36(3):431-437. doi: 10.1016/j.aucc.2022.02.002. Epub 2022 Mar 25.

Higgins AM, Brooker JE, Mackie M, Cooper DJ, Harris AH. Health economic evaluations of sepsis interventions in critically ill adult patients: a systematic review. Journal of Intensive Care. 2020 Jan 8;8:5. doi: 10.1186/s40560-019-0412-2.