Version 1.1

Major Update: now with deterministic and stochastic optimization

Ersatz screenshot, showing a histogram of the Gamma function output.

Description

You think that @Risk™ and Crystal Ball™ are seriously overpriced for what they offer? Exactly my idea. So I wrote  my own, which I now make generally available as a low cost alternative.

Rather whimsically called ‘Ersatz’, this software is a full strength alternative, with some extra features thrown in for those of you who are into health economic evaluation modeling and/or microsimulation using Excel.

Ersatz makes more  than 60 additional functions available in Excel, most of them producing randomly drawn numbers from specific distributions, but also output,  control, statistical, and special functions to calculate such things as health-adjusted discounted life years.

Give the free trial  version a spin. It comes with several example spreadsheets that will give you an excellent idea of Ersatz’s power, versatility, and simplicity of use.

It’s a steal for just 100 Aus dollars!

Features

Fast, compiled code (no VBA!).

Parametric and non-parametric bootstrapping

Conditional firing of Ersatz functions

Multinomial and Dirichlet distributions

Correlated random draws

Multiple options for sensitivity analysis

Four different optimization algorithms

Product Summary

Ersatz is a bootstrap add-in for Microsoft Excel for Windows. It allows to do uncertainty analysis (aka ‘risk analysis’, ‘Monte Carlo simulation’, ‘probabilistic sensitivity analysis’, ‘bootstrapping’) and  microsimulation in Excel.

Price: AUD 100

Download

User Guide
Function Overview
The User Guide and Function Overview documents are included in the trial and full version downloads.

Trial version
The trial version is fully functional, except that you cannot save results.

Full version
You can run the full version only after you have applied for and  received a serial number and release code. These will be supplied after payment is received.

Version history

Workshop on Health Economic Evaluation

The Centre for Burden of Disease and Cost-Effectiveness, School of Population Health, University of Queensland, conducts an annual five-day workshop on Health Economic Evaluation, featuring Ersatz for uncertainty and sensitivity  analysis.

For details go to the Centre’s website.