Throughout the medical and healthcare community worldwide, available evidence and knowledge on the relationships between healthcare and outcomes is being synthesized and transformed into guidance for practitioners. Thus, physician societies and health care providers are producing clinical practice guidelines to inform clinical care from diagnosis through treatment and management to palliative care. Similarly, medical researchers engaged in different types of study, from clinical research in general to specific methodologies and disciplines, have understood the value of research guidelines and efforts have been underway to develop and disseminate them widely. Development and effective communication of these guidelines will help raise the level of research standards; help educate those entering the field and those attentive to its work for their policy making; and perhaps most importantly, eventually raise the reliability, validity and value of the research that is the subject of the guidelines.
Practitioners in the relative new field of health economics should be commended for their vigilance with respect to the quality of health economics research being performed, and for taking steps to improve relevant methodologies, and educate students and users alike. In this regard, the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR) is playing a leading role in recognizing areas that have matured sufficiently for guidelines to both be needed and be available and useful. Guidelines for Good Practices for Outcomes Research overall have been produced and disseminated by ISPOR in many types of economic evaluation, clinical-economic modeling, observational studies, patient centered and clinician reported outcomes studies, and other methods.
Relevant to its mandate to publish original research in medical economics, the Journal of Medical Economics is pleased to participate in the latest ISPOR effort to improve medical research and its dissemination to health care policy makers, providers, patients and researchers. Specifically, economic evaluations have become standard procedure in new health technology assessment in many countries (developed and developing alike) since the mid 1990's, however, until now little effort has been put in to standardize how reporting of evidence should be performed. This has often resulted in criticisms of published works that have been thought to be either biased or unreliable, perhaps in part due to a lack of a standard reporting mechanism. Concerns were therefore raised as to whether these results might have led to misinformed decision making processes ending up in improper use of resources or worse still, health hazards in patients and citizens.
Against this background, in 2009, ISPOR appointed a task force to review current practices and to recommend measures in the form of a set of guidelines to improve the consistency and transparency of economic evaluation reporting. The Task Force included senior and expert personnel from various journals in the field to enhance representativeness and value of its deliberations. The work product of this Task Force is called ‘Consolidated Health Economic Evaluation Reporting Standards (CHEERS)’.
It is with great pleasure that JME, as a top-10 publisher of economic evaluations internationally, has been invited to participate in the co-publication of the CHEERS statement together with other leading journalsCitation1. The CHEERS statement has been included in this issue of JME. The full CHEERS Task Force report was published in March, 2013.
It is our commitment to the health community that data and findings published in JME only carry the highest standards of reliability. The CHEERS statement will definitely help us achieve our objective in the most efficient and professional manner. To this end, credit should be given to the far-sighted vision of ISPOR and the persistant effort of the members of the Task Force.
We would strongly recommend all academics and researchers in the field of health economics and outcomes research (HEOR), policy-makers, and industry and frontline healthcare professionals engaged in new technology assessment to read the CHEERS statement carefully and follow the recommended procedures as much as possible. This is critical in assuring all the data and results published in the future are of the stipulated high standard and, hence, their reliability, neutrality, and value can be guaranteed.
Transparency
Declaration of funding
The authors received no payment in preparation of this manuscript.
Declaration of financial/other relationships
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
References
- Husereau D, Drummond M, Petrou S, et al. Consolidated Health Economic Evaluation Reporting Standards (CHEERS) statement. J Med Econ 2013; Advance online publication doi 10.3111/13696998.2013.784591
Notice of correction
The article has been modified since the original online publication. This is the final version of the article and matches the printed version.