What does ethics have to do with maths?
The algorithms of social networks such as Facebook and Instagram are currently being criticised for their potential to divide society, not least from an ethical perspective. Health economic models, on the other hand, are hardly ever criticised by our ethics institutes. So are they all ethically unobjectionable?
The truth is that our ethics institutes cannot judge this at all. Because they don’t know how these models work mathematically and statistically. However, when the Ethics Council for Public Statistics in Switzerland describes the statistical models for insurers’ cost-effectiveness procedures as an “abuse of statistics” in an opinion (https://www.ethikrat-stat.ch/de/assets/File/faelle/a1_Scan.pdf), this shows that a closer look would be necessary. It is even the prerequisite for being able to draw ethical conclusions from the results of these models. The VEMS has been doing this for fifteen years now. With this website, we want to share our mathematical knowledge and empower both the medical profession and ethics to communicate health economics on an equal footing.
Poor health economic modelling can portray efficient treatments and efficient practitioners as inefficient and vice versa. If you take their results unchecked as a basis for control instruments, perhaps because they confirm your own bias, you are contributing to a dysfunctional economy. This is the economic problem. As a result, counterproductive control instruments based on inadequate health economic models also lead to rationing among the sick, elderly and disabled. This is the ethical problem. Thirdly, if a study, a risk calculator, a health economic model, an assessment procedure, etc. is the cause of avoidable illnesses and deaths due to poor quality, then liability issues also arise (https://varifo.ch/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/AGLAGutachtenKieser012021-2.pdf). We are at the beginning of a comprehensive integration of health economics into the treatment pathways of medicine. An ethics that leaves this process to its own devices and waves it through unseen cannot fulfil its social mission. This website shows how it could ask critical questions in order to do justice to this.