Doctor holding AI icon
Image source: istock.com/Akarapong Chairean
The National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) has developed a new reporting standard for health economic valuations of AI technologies.
Named CHEERS-AI (Consolidated Health Economic Evaluation Reporting Standards for Interventions that Use Artificial Intelligence), it is aimed at improving transparency and quality in the reporting of studies on the cost-effectiveness of AI enabled healthcare interventions.
NICE said this will help healthcare decision makers to understand the value of treatments that use AI, helping patients to gain faster access to those most likely to work.
The organisation has conducted a review of how AI for healthcare is evaluated and identified limitations including poor quality input data, conflicts of interest in the authors, a lack of transparent reporting and unclear information about the functionality of the technology.
In response, it has designed CHEERS-AI based on existing best practice in health economic evaluation reporting by including the original 28 standards from the previously published CHEERS-2022 economic evaluation standards for healthcare. It has added eight extra details for the AI related nuances, and 10 standards covering areas such as user autonomy, AI learning over time and the development of AI components.
Transparent and reproducible
“Our CHEERS-AI checklist helps to ensure transparent and reproducible reporting of AI-specific details in health economic evaluations,” NICE said.
“This supports the interpretation and comparison of such studies by reviewers and decision-makers. We hope that it will raise the standard of economic evaluation reporting as AI’s presence in healthcare grows.
“The professional society for health economics and outcomes research, ISPOR, has endorsed CHEERS-AI and it’s included in the Equator Network list of reporting checklists.”
CHEERS-AI has been developed as part of the Next Generation Health Technology Assessment (HTx) project, funded by the EU.