Publicly Available Software Tools for Decision-Makers During an Emergent Epidemic

Rotavirus infection is responsible for about 500,000 deaths annually, and the disease burden is disproportionately borne by children in low-income countries. Motivated by the global recommendation by the WHO that all countries include infant rotavirus vaccination in their national immunization programs, the objective of this analysis was to provide information on the expected health, economic and financial consequences of rotavirus vaccines in the 72 GAVI support-eligible countries. The authors synthesized population-level data from various sources (primarily from…

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) develops evidence-based recommendations about preventive care based on comprehensive systematic reviews of the best available evidence. Decision models provide a complementary, quantitative approach to support the USPSTF as it deliberates about the evidence and develops recommendations for clinical and policy use. This article describes the rationale for using modeling, an approach to selecting topics for modeling, and how modeling may inform recommendations about clinical preventive services.  

This paper presents a two-step approach to model calibration of a comprehensive natural history model of human papillomavirus (HPV) and cervical cancer. Using primary epidemiologic data from a longitudinal study of women in Brazil, a plausible range for each input parameter was identified that would produce model output within the 95% confidence intervals of the data. The authors then performed a simultaneous search over all input parameters to identify parameter sets that produced output consistent…