CHEERS 2022 statement: reporting guidance for health economic evaluations gets a makeover
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- New CHEERS statement reflects the need for guidance that is more broadly applicable and engages stakeholders.
- It is hoped that the new 28-item checklist will be useful to those who identify, prepare, and interpret health economic evaluations.
The Consolidated Health Economic Evaluation Reporting Standards (CHEERS) statement, originally published in 2013, was developed to help researchers, peer reviewers, and readers in their reporting and interpretation of economic evaluations of health interventions, and to aid reproducibility. Earlier this year, the statement was updated and presented in an article in the BMJ. The CHEERS 2022 statement was also a topic for discussion during a roundtable session at this year’s ISMPP annual meeting, in which attendees talked about publication guidelines.
The update was motivated by the need for guidance that considers recent developments in the field and is more broadly applicable to all types of health economic evaluations and forms of intervention. The revisions also reflect the increased role of stakeholder involvement.
The major changes in the CHEERS 2022 statement include removal of items distinguishing between model-based and study-based measures, and addition of items related to the following:
- patients or service recipients, the general public, and community or stakeholder involvement and engagement
- reporting and availability of a health economic analysis plan
- characterising distributional effects.
In addition, the statement recommends reporting where publicly available models can be found, and encourages sharing of unlocked models with editors and reviewers.
The ISPOR and EQUATOR network guidance was used to advise an expert task force to revise the statement, which was then initially reviewed for its understandability, interpretability, and replicability by a group of patient and public involvement and engagement contributors, and later by experts in the field via a modified Delphi method.
The resultant CHEERS summary is a 28-item checklist, with accompanying recommendations to aid appropriate interpretation. The items can be broadly subdivided into the following categories:
- Title
- Abstract
- Introduction
- Methods
- Results
- Discussion
- Other relevant information
It is recognised that the volume of information required by the statement for adequate reporting will exceed the space limitations imposed by most journals, so authors are asked to make the necessary information available in supplementary appendices or online resources.
The impact of the original CHEERS statement is being analysed in an ongoing evaluation, with results expected later in 2022, but it is hoped that the revised guidance will improve decision-making in health economic evaluations and, ultimately, the quality of reporting.
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