ABSTRACT

To properly inform decision makers, a health technology assessment (HTA) must provide information that is not only relevant to the problem they face but also credible (Mandelblatt et al. 2012). For a model used to inform the HTA, this credibility has to do with: how well the structure represents the disease, its course and management; the correctness of the programming and calculations; and the degree of accuracy with which the model outputs reflect the real world that the model is trying to simulate. If the decision maker is uncertain or, worse, suspicious of the model’s credibility, its results are unlikely to be given much stock in making decisions (Watkins 2012). Thus, it is important that a modeler evaluates the performance of a simulation against suitable criteria, and that the results of this evaluation be made available to the decision makers or, for that matter, to any stakeholder who requests them (Afzali et al. 2013). Without this documented validation, it is difficult to assess whether the simulation results are worth paying attention to (Caro 2015; Caro and Möller 2014).