Prof. Michael F. Drummond: Reporting Guidelines for Health Economic Evaluations: BMJ Guidelines for Authors and Peer Reviewers of Economic Submissions
Editor’s note
In March 2021, AME Publishing Company initiated the translation of the book “Guidelines for Reporting Health Research: A User’s Manual” into Chinese and complete the work in June 2021. While the Chinese edition is now under the process of official publication, the AME editorial office launches an interview with the book editors and authors, hoping to highlight some update on the status and trends of the reporting guidelines in the Chinese edition.
Here, we take the pleasure to interview Dr. Michael F. Drummond to share his insights based on the book. Dr. Michael F. Drummond is a chapter author of the book and his chapter title is “Reporting Guidelines for Health Economic Evaluations: BMJ Guidelines for Authors and Peer Reviewers of Economic Submissions, 296”.
Expert’s introduction
Prof. Michael Drummond (Figure 1), BSc, MCom, DPhil is Professor of Health Economics and former Director of the Centre for Health Economics at the University of York. His particular field of interest is in the economic evaluation of health care treatments and programmes. He has undertaken evaluations in a wide range of medical fields including care of the elderly, neonatal intensive care, immunization programmes, services for people with AIDS, eye health care and pharmaceuticals. He is the author of two major textbooks and more than 700 scientific papers, and has acted as a consultant to the World Health Organization and the European Union. He has been President of the International Society of Technology Assessment in Health Care, and the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research. In October 2010 he was made a member of the National Academy of Medicine in the USA. He has advised several governments on the assessment of health technologies and chaired one of the Guideline Review Panels for the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) in the UK. He is currently Co-Editor-in-Chief of Value in Health and has been awarded 3 honorary doctorates, from City University (London), Erasmus University (Rotterdam) and the University of Lisbon.
Interview
AME: Why does BMJ focus specifically on the “full economic Evaluation” manuscripts and make a separate guideline for it?
Prof. Michael F. Drummond: The original aim of producing the BMJ guideline was to help the journal’s editors and reviewers interpret economic studies, since more of these were being submitted to the Journal. Many of the Journal’s reviewers were not economists, so the introduction to the guideline explained the different types of economic evaluation. The guidelines were not intended only for ‘full economic evaluations’. Merely, the point was that these studies are the most useful and interesting, since they consider both costs and consequences of treatments and make a comparison between treatments.
AME: Why did BMJ make the BMJ Guidelines when there is a CHEERS reporting guideline (recommended on EQUATOR Home Page)?
Prof. Michael F. Drummond: The BMJ guidelines date from 1996. The CHEERS guidelines were not produced until 2013 and are a CONSOLIDATION of the BMJ guidelines and other guidelines that already existed.
AME: What are the differences and strengths of the BMJ and CHEERS guidelines for Health Economic Evaluations?
Prof. Michael F. Drummond: The CHEERS guidelines have the following strengths:
- they were developed later, drawing on experience from the development of the BMJ guidelines;
- they were developed consistently with the methods outlined by the EQUATOR initiative and employed a Delphi process, involving journal editors and experts in economic evaluation;
- they make a clearer distinction between the quality of REPORTING and the underlying quality of the METHODS used in studies;
- they are being updated, with the publication of CHEERS 2022 being in January 2022.
AME: In what circumstances do you think journals should follow established reporting guidelines and in what circumstances should journals develop their own guidelines?
Prof. Michael F. Drummond: This is a matter for the journals concerned. The CHEERS guidelines have the strengths outlined above. Potentially, they cover the whole range of applications of economic evaluation in health care. It’s possible that some areas of medicine may need a focus on additional issues (e.g., the long-term uncertainty associated with gene therapy), but these are better considered alongside the points covered by CHEERS and not by developing a separate set of guidelines.
Acknowledgments
Funding: None.
Footnote
Provenance and Peer Review: This article was commissioned by the editorial office, Annals of Translational Medicine for the series “Insights From The Reporting Guidelines”. The article did not undergo external peer review.
Conflicts of Interest: All authors have completed the ICMJE uniform disclosure form (available at https://atm.amegroups.com/article/view/10.21037/atm-2022-22/coif). The series “Insights from the reporting guidelines” was commissioned by the editorial office without any funding or sponsorship. KJD, GSL, KZ, YL and FY report that they are all full employees of AME Publishing Company. The authors have no other conflicts of interest to declare.
Ethical Statement: The authors are accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.
Open Access Statement: This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which permits the non-commercial replication and distribution of the article with the strict proviso that no changes or edits are made and the original work is properly cited (including links to both the formal publication through the relevant DOI and the license). See: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
