Landmark ISPOR Research Reveals Current State and Future Directions for Shared Assessment Models
Lawrenceville, NJ, USA—June 17, 2025—Value in Health, the official journal of ISPOR—The Professional Society for Health Economics and Outcomes Research, announced today the publication of a groundbreaking study mapping the landscape of available open source models (OSMs) in health economics and revealing key insights into their distribution, characteristics, and applications. The report, “Mapping the Landscape of Open Source Health Economic Models: A Systematic Database Review and Analysis: An ISPOR Special Interest Group Report” was published in the June 2025 issue of Value in Health.
"Health economic models underpin health technology assessment, which is used to assess the value of an intervention for a given disease," noted author Raymond H. Henderson, PhD, Senior Health Technology Assessment Manager, Salutem Insights Ltd, Ireland. "A subset of health economic models is open source models, which are defined variably as models that are fully transparent, providing unrestricted access to the model’s source code along with permission for open use, or that are publicly accessible, along with their underlying code and a detailed report outlining the model’s objectives, methods, structure, and results."
This paper represents the first comprehensive evaluation of OSMs in the context of health economics, highlighting their potential to enhance transparency, efficiency, and reproducibility in health technology assessments. The authors, an international team of health economics experts, conducted a systematic database review informed by guidance from ISPOR’s OSM Special Interest Group.
Key findings:
- R (a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics) is the predominant software platform used for building open source or open access health economic models, accounting for 64% of OSMs
- GitHub hosts 74% of all identified OSMs, followed by Zenodo (11%)
- Infectious disease represents the most common application area (29%), followed by oncology (13%) and neurology (9%)
- Markov models are the most frequently used modeling approach (49%)
- Nearly a quarter of the identified models lack a clear license, creating barriers to their use
In conclusion, the authors say that their findings “support existing recommendations and align with the goals of frameworks such as Sharing Tools and Artifacts for Reusable Simulations (STARS), which advocates the use of open licenses, clear documentation, and persistent identifiers to ensure accessibility and reproducibility in shared models. Future research could focus on evaluating OSMs to assess their quality and functionality, developing standardized reporting guidelines to improve the findability, clarity, and reproducibility of OSMs, and metadata standards to improve their discoverability."
This research has significant implications for health policy decision making, as OSMs can help inform resource allocation, reimbursement decisions, and the development of cost-effective healthcare interventions.
About ISPOR’s Open Source Model Special Interest Group
Background:
The world is moving toward more openness, sharing, and collaboration. There has been a marked growth in open science; however, there is currently no efficient process for creating, sharing, evaluating, and updating health economic models. This situation can result in the expensive re-creation of existing models or the inappropriate use of outdated models. Moreover, models are often not updated at all. To address these issues, certain institutions have begun to promote and encourage access to open source models and some journals make models available to reviewers upon their request. However, it is unclear how these various groups will encourage widespread model openness and transparency in a repository or otherwise, given intellectual property rights, costs to initiate and sustain, and legal, information technology, and other issues surrounding such an endeavor. This ISPOR member group aimed to address these and other challenges and aspects related to the concept of open source models. The ISPOR Open Source Special Interest Group has recently been renamed to a Community of Interest and serves as an online centralized platform to facilitate discussion and dissemination of information on the topic of open source models. Click here to learn more.
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ABOUT ISPOR
ISPOR—The Professional Society for Health Economics and Outcomes Research (HEOR), is an international, multistakeholder, nonprofit dedicated to advancing HEOR excellence to improve decision making for health globally. The Society is the leading source for scientific conferences, peer-reviewed and MEDLINE®-indexed publications, good practices guidance, education, collaboration, and tools/resources in the field.
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ABOUT VALUE IN HEALTH
Value in Health (ISSN 1098-3015) is an international, indexed journal that publishes original research and health policy articles that advance the field of health economics and outcomes research to help healthcare leaders make evidence-based decisions. The journal’s current impact factor score is 4.9 and its 5-year impact factor score is 5.6. Value in Health is ranked 5th of 118 journals in Health Policy and Services, 15th of 174 journals in Health Care Sciences and Services, and 56th of 597 journals in Economics. Value in Health is a monthly publication that circulates to more than 55,000 readers around the world.
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