Abstract

The notion that large amounts of healthcare funds may be wasted in research has perhaps not attracted the attention that it warrants.¹ The concept of opportunity cost, highlighting that once funds are spent in one area, they are no longer available for other investments, is fairly intuitive. Yet the development and widespread adoption of explicit quantitative methods to prioritize research decisions has been slow. Although a number of quantitative approaches have been developed, these methods are not used routinely by research funders.

The science of research prioritization has made strides in the past 20 years, moving away from unstructured expert discussions toward the development of quantitative methods to assess the value of research and the inclusion of a wider range of stakeholders in the process, including, importantly, patients and clinicians. Several approaches to using more explicit criteria for research prioritization have been proposed and explored. Frequently cited criteria include burden of disease, current variation in clinical practice, and likelihood of uptake of the new treatment in practice. These criteria have been included in deliberations by expert panels and incorporated into formal value of information (VOI) models.² VOI methods are the subject of 2 important reports issued by the ISPOR Task Force.^2,3