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Validation
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 etal. 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
reect 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 ...