CHEERS Guideline for Economic Evaluation
03 Oct 2018
The economic aspects and evaluations of diseases and management assessed in clinical studies are very important as costs are an important factor in deciding the treatments, and planning public health management. The reporting of such parameters of health economics and outcome research need to be carefully presented to allow scrutiny of study findings. Public health professionals need to plan keeping in focus the populations that are diverse in nature with budgets that are reducing. The economic evaluation provides evidence based decision making that helps the public health community to compare the impact of different programs and future planning. This may impact ongoing programs which may be stopped and new programs planned such as vaccinations and management of communicable diseases.
Transparency and complete presentation of evaluations in a comprehensive structure of reporting is very essential for economic outcomes of health research as the number of studies are ever increasing with no data warehousing steps to store and evaluate data by other individuals or committees such as ethics review boards etc. Also, as mentioned earlier, there are significant costs involved in developing public health programs which should not be misled.
“Economic evaluation has been defined as the comparative analysis of alternative courses of action in terms of both their costs and their consequences” (Drummond MF, 2005).
International Society For Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR) task force has come up with the Consolidated Health Economic Evaluation Reporting Standards (CHEERS) statement with their recommendations in the form of a checklist to optimize reporting of health economic evaluations. The checklist consists of 24 items and recommendations mentioning the minimum amount of information that is recommended to be included when reporting economic evaluations. This would help in improving the reporting of research outcomes and, in turn, would improve health and health care decisions or polices of public health management.
CHEERS statement is mainly aimed at researchers conducting economic health outcome research along with the editors and peer reviewers of the journals who are involved in reviewing and publishing these reports. The CHEERS statement is believed to be a more useful and practical tool for these group of individuals. The checklist can be used as a tool for assessing the quality of reporting but not on the actual conduct of the study.
The CHEERS statement is an attempt to compile, consolidate and update previous efforts or guidelines for reporting of health economic outcome research into a single standard of reporting helping the researchers.
The Cheers statement with accompanying recommendations are explained with examples and explanations to understand them clearly along with its importance.
This would standardize the reporting of such studies which may help in making policies that may finally benefit the population.