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Introduction
For some time now, it has been recognized that decisions in medicine should be
based on the best available evidence, rather than on the opinion of a particular
practitioner (Sackett etal. 1996), and many techniques have evolved to gather,
analyze, and interpret available data to serve this purpose (Khan etal. 2011).
Judgments made by health care decision makers on behalf of populations—
whether to cover an intervention, at what price, for whom, and so on—should
also be driven by the best available evidence (Eddy 2005). In some respects,
this is even more important at the population level because the consequences
of a poor assessment ...