Discrete Event Simulation for Health Technology Assessment

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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 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

reect 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 ...