Overview

Ka Keat is a Research Fellow in Health Economics at the Department of Population Health Sciences. While he dedicates most of his time in research, he also teaches in Masters-level modules and in workshops. He also leads early-career researchers in KCL and in health economics professional societies.

Research

Ka Keat's research aims to improve health and social care services and population health. He works with lab scientists, engineers and clinicians to assess the value of adopting an intervention or the value of investing in further research of an innovation, with special interest on chronic disease prevention, screening and risk-stratified interventions. He currently works on two trial-based economic evaluations (one of them is the IMPROVE trial) and two model-based economic evaluations. He is also a co-investigator in two NIHR grants in examining potential cost-effectiveness of wireless monitoring for preterm babies, and potential cost-effectiveness of algorithms predicting dialysis. Besides economic evaluation, he is also competent in systematic reviews, patient-reported outcomes measure and longitudinal data analysis. He has published over 40 peer-reviewed articles using these methodologies on ageing and various chronic conditions.

Ka Keat also actively contributes to ethics and peer review. He is a member of KCL Health Faculties Low-Risk Research Ethics Sub-Committee. He also regularly review for grant funders and peer-reviewed journals. He currently serves as a methodological advisor for Journal of Applied Gerontology, and is an Editorial Board Member for BMC Health Services Research.

You may see Ka Keat's complete list of publications and peer-reviews on his Google Scholar profile, Pure profile, Scopus profile or Web of Science profile.

Teaching

Besides research, Ka Keat also teaches economic evaluations to Masters students through the Master of Public Health programme, and to lab scientists and clinicians through workshops. He also supervises supervises MPH dissertations. He is currently an Associate Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy. In 2023, he was nominated for King’s Teaching Award and Faculty of Life Sciences & Medicine (FoLSM) Staff Award (Research Guidance and Mentorship Award Category).

Professional Leadership

In KCL, Ka Keat is co-leading the School of Life Course & Population Sciences (SLCPS) Early Career Research & Teaching Network (ECRTN). Outside KCL, he is an active member of the Professional Society for Health Economics & Outcomes Research (ISPOR) since his PhD year. He is currently serving in the ISPOR New Professionals Committee, ISPOR Precision Medicine & Advanced Therapy SIG, and the ISPOR Europe Programme Committee (2023 and 2024).

More about Ka Keat

He is a pharmacist by training, graduated from University of Strathclyde. He pursued MSc International Health Policy (Health Economics) at London School of Economics & Political Science, and PhD at Duke-NUS Medical School, National University of Singapore, Singapore. 

He used to work as a pharmacist in Malaysia, and as a researcher at the Institute for Clinical Research, Malaysia.