Predicting future outcomes in health technology assessment (HTA)

This year, the annual Research Students' Conference was held in Sheffield between 24th and 27th July. This was during the extended heatwave, so the weather was fantastic (sometimes a bit hot to be inside!), and there were lots of great talks and posters on display. The full title of the conference is the Research Students' Conference in Probability and Statistics, and as you might expect, the Royal Statistical Society (and particularly the Young Statisticians Section ) featured prominently. There was some twitter activity too, see @RSC_2019 (they updated their name after the conference...) and #RSC_2018 for more details. This conference came when I was about half-way through my PhD (it started in January 2017), so it was an opportunity to showcase some initial results. I had both a talk and a poster, on separate topics. My talk was entitled " Dynamic survival models and generalised linear models for analysing and extrapolating survival data in health technology

This recent article contains a wealth of interesting information on public involvement in health research. Hence I thought that it would be worth discussing some of them here, and adding my thoughts on what this may mean for methodological research. The full title of the article is "How embedded is public involvement in mainstream health research in England a decade after policy implementation? A realist evaluation" and it can be found here . As a side-note, the authors use the term 'patient and public involvement' (PPI), whereas I generally refer to 'public involvement'. I do so as, first I take the term 'public' to include 'patients', and secondly because my work (being methodological in nature) will apply to the public in general, not to specific patient groups. However, I appreciate that depending on the context either term would be appropriate. Arguments for public involvement. The authors identify two main arguments for public

My fellowship is methodological, so I am interested in examples of public and patient involvement (PPI) in methodological work. This 2016 article isn't specifically about methodological work, but it is about PPI in HTA, which has methodological components, so is relevant to my work. As the title suggests, the objective of this work is to develop a framework to allow patients and members of the public to be involved in HTA. Evidence was identified via three sources: a systematic literature review, searching the websites of HTA organisations, and 'stakeholder dialogue'. Outputs included six guiding principles for PPI, it should be: Purposeful Pragmatic Fair and equitable Proportional Evidence-informed Transparent More details on these principles may be found here . In addition, PPI was broken-down into three mechanisms of involvement: Communication: such as dissemination of results. For this, PPI is usually passive. Consultation: to gain input, such as o

The problem of trying to predict future outcomes has long been a problem in HTA. The below provide some key reading on extrapolation, from a variety of different perspectives. All of the below should be open access, but if you have any problems please contact me . NICE Decision Support Unit Technical Support Document 14 (2013) This is a detailed report into the methods available for the analysis and extrapolation of time-to-event outcomes (also known as survival data). It was authored by the NICE Decision Support Unit (DSU), who provide support to NICE and their HTA work (the DSU have a series of Technical Support Documents , which are required reading for anyone working in HTA). This report had two main components: a review of extrapolation methods currently used, and guidance on producing extrapolations. This guidance includes both a model selection process algorithm, and clarification points. Since its publication, this report has been highly cited and used, both in the literat

This is the first post on what will become an overview of my NIHR Doctoral Research Fellowship . It is entitled "Good practice guidance for the prediction of future outcomes in health technology assessment (HTA)", and further details can be found here . The aim of these blogs will be to provide more information on aspects of this fellowship, including public involvement.