PharmacoEconomics - Call for Papers: Individual Level Models for Economic Evaluation
Economic decision models are used in the economic evaluation of health technologies and provided to health technology assessment (HTA) agencies and payers for the purpose of determining reimbursement and price negotiations.
Individual-level models represent disease pathways and outcomes analysed by using chance to process individuals. Such models (e.g., discrete event simulation) are more flexible than Markov cohort (state transition) models in the complexity of the trajectories and how clinical and economic data and assumptions are incorporated. For example, heterogenous distributions of patient characteristics can be fully represented rather than forcing homogeneity. However, they are more computationally demanding.
There is a long history of the use of individual-level models and guidance for their design and implementation has been published, but their use remains limited relative to cohort models. In recent years there has been increasing interest in the use of open access software for the development of such models. It is, thus, timely to review the status of individual-level models.
Pharmacoeconomics invites the submission of papers (original research, reviews, and tutorial pieces) on developing and using individual-level models for economic evaluations for a themed issue of the journal to be published in 2025 and guest edited by Salah Ghabri (French National Authority for Health - France), Jaime Caro (London School of Economics - England and McGill University, Canada) and Jonathan Karnon (Flinders University - Australia).
We encourage papers from the perspectives of a variety of stakeholders including methodologists, health technology assessment bodies, payers and pharmaceutical industry. Papers developing or employing novel methods are particularly encouraged. They can be either methodological or applied.
Topics of interest include:
Methodological or Tutorial papers: e.g. reporting on conceptualization, good programming practices (including the choice of software or techniques for optimizing model convergence and calibration or reducing the amount of time taken by probabilistic sensitivity analyses), assessing different types of individual-level models (e.g. discrete event simulation, continuous simulation, microsimulation, hybrids) or good practices on model transparency, validation and uncertainty analyses.
Applied papers: e.g. illustrating the use of individual-level models highlighting their benefits with respect to the representation of defined populations, interventions and outcomes, using specified data sources (e.g. clinical trials, real world data).
Please submit an abstract describing your proposed paper by August 15th, 2024, to chris.carswell@springer.com (this opens in a new tab) . Full papers will be invited by September 30th, 2024, and manuscripts are due by January 31st, 2025.