CHEERS

“Consolidated Health Economic Evaluation Reporting Standards 2022 (CHEERS 2022) Explanation and Elaboration: A Report of the ISPOR Economic Evaluation Guidelines Good Research Practices Task Force II” describes reporting guidance in detail. CHEERS 2022 includes a 28-item checklist that outlines how and when these reporting standards should be used.

The report describes: 

1. the rationale behind each reporting item recommendation with supporting evidence (if available),
2. accompanying example(s) to illustrate and facilitate its appropriate use
3. a description and an explanation of why it is important for interpreting published economic evaluations.

Economic evaluations of health interventions are comparative analyses of alternative courses of action in terms of their costs and consequences. They can provide valuable information to policy makers, payers, health professionals, patients, and the public about choices that affect health and the use of resources. 

Despite a growth in published economic evaluations and the availability of reporting guidance, there is a considerable lack of standardization and transparency in reporting economic evaluations. This presents a reporting challenge due to the substantial information that must be conveyed to allow scrutiny of study findings. 

The CHEERS 2022 Good Practices Report provides healthcare stakeholders with guidance and a checklist to improve reporting. This will help authors provide accurate information on which health interventions are being compared and in what context, how the evaluation was undertaken, what the findings are, and other details that may aid readers and reviewers in interpretation and use of the study. In doing so, it can also aid researchers in replicating research findings. Some checklist items (eg, title, abstract) were also included to aid those researching economic evaluation literature.

Since the original publication of the CHEERS Statement, several developments motivated an update. These included:

• limitations of the original CHEERS report, including the absence of reporting guidance on cost-benefit analyses
• inappropriate use of CHEERS—as a tool to assess the quality of methods, rather than the quality of reporting
• potentially misleading use of CHEERS as a tool to quantitatively score studies in systematic reviews (as it was not designed for this purpose)
• methods developments in economic evaluation including an update of methods by the Second Panel on Cost-Effectiveness in Health and Medicine, (eg, new recommendations on the perspective of economic evaluations, the classification of costs and benefits in a structured table, and the inclusion of related and unrelated healthcare costs in added years of life)
• updates by health technology assessment (HTA) bodies that have revised their guidance on conducting and appraising economic evaluations
• increasing calls for the use of health economic analysis plans
• use of open-source models, which may be of particular importance as published economic evaluations are increasingly available in journals with broad data sharing policies
• increased use of and guidance for economic evaluations to support policy decisions in immunization programs and global health in low- and middle-income countries
• growing number of economic evaluations that attempt to capture consequences extending beyond health outcomes, such as equity and distributional effects
• amplified role of stakeholder participation in health research and HTA, including patients and the public

CHEERS 2022 is endorsed by the following journals:

• Applied Health Economics and Health Policy
• BJOG
• BMC Health Services Research
• BMC Medicine
• BMC Public Health
• BMJ
• Clinical Therapeutics
• Health Policy Open
• Health Technology Assessment
• International Journal of Technology Assessment in Health Care
• Journal of Managed Care & Specialty Pharmacy
• Journal of Medical Economics
• MDM Policy & Practice
• Pharmacoeconomics
• The European Journal of Health Economics
• Value in Health
• Value in Health Regional Issues

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