Model Transparency and Validation: A Report of the ISPOR-SMDM Modeling Task Force-7

Decision-analytic models synthesize available data on disease burden and intervention effectiveness to project estimates of the long-term consequences of care. While models have been influential in informing US cancer screening guidelines under ideal conditions, incorporating detailed data on real-world screening practice has been limited given the complexity of screening processes and behaviors throughout diverse health delivery systems in the United States. The authors describe the synergies that exist between decision-analytic models and health care utilization…

Trial-based economic evaluations are increasingly conducted to support healthcare decision-making but there are inevitable methodological challenges. This tutorial provides step-by-step guidance on how to combine appropriate statistical methods using a ready-to-use R script, and addresses missing data, correlated costs and effects, baseline imbalances, and skewness of costs and/or effects. The authors also provide the theoretical background of these methods, and demonstrate their application through a simulated trial-based economic evaluation.    

This chapter summarizes the findings of a systematic search of the cost-effectiveness literature on interventions to improve reproductive, maternal, newborn, and child health. Interventions for newborn health, treatment of febrile illness, immunization against preventable diseases, and micronutrient interventions remain among the most cost-effective and affordable. Other studies explore how to provide existing interventions using new platforms to increase outreach or decrease cost per person covered, or both. Interventions provided in the community may achieve both purposes to…