Joris Van Dijk

Joris is a 24-year-old postgraduate student at the University of Twente, the Netherlands, and is attending the master degree programs in Technical Medicine and Health Sciences. His research for Health Sciences at the department of Health Technology and Services Research is mainly focused at the differences between methodologies used for risk-benefit analysis.

In his spare time during the winter Joris prefers to be in the mountains with his snowboard, skis or his speed skates and during his free summer days you can often find him on his racing bike.

Research Goals

Risk benefit analysis (RBA) is more and more commonly used to assess if new medicines and medical devices are eligible for introduction to the healthcare market, however, many types of methodologies for RBA are used and no standardized RBA methodology meeting the requirements of health care policy makers or companies is available.

The research Joris is conducting is focused on the comparison of three methodologies used for RBA; profile case best-worst scaling, modulated with the MaxDiff Set module, discrete choice experiment, modulated with the  CBC module and multi criteria decision analysis, via SMART weighting, modulated with the SSI Web module.

Determining the risk benefit trade-off with these methodologies, looking at the associated risks and benefits of two treatments, total hip arthroplasty (THA) and total hip resurfacing (TRA), where the latter one has more benefits but also more risks, allows empiric comparison of these methodologies. Hopefully to make the next step in the standardization of a RBA, eventually resulting in better medical decision making, conform patient preferences, in the assessment of medical devices and medicines.