For April 2020, we feature the Health Economics Working group in the ESO Committee Corner. A major aim of this working group has been to develop resources to facilitate the standardisation of economic evaluations of stroke treatments. In our manuscript, recently published in the European Stroke Journal (January 2020), we provide a protocol template for economic evaluations and a guidance document for collecting data on resource use in stroke populations. These materials were developed over two years through survey and consensus processes. We acknowledge the strong support and contributions of Professor Eivind Berge who sadly died this year, not long after this paper was published.

The ESO Health Economics Working group are now working in collaboration with the Virtual Stroke Trial Archive (VISTA) and have begun an audit of existing trial data in the archive. The aim of the audit is to identify all data relevant for health economic analyses that is currently held by VISTA,  which encompasses full data sets from many large multinational clinical trials many including anonymized patient-level data.

The working group has used the data collection template, recently published in the European Stroke Journal, as a basis for categorising what is available from each trial data set.  This will allow the working group to establish a health economic specific archive and provide a clear overview of what is available for researchers who wish to use this resource for future projects. The VISTA collaboration has established protocols for data sharing and archive management. Our working group seeks to building on the existing frameworks and is in the process of establishing a leadership group and methods for how to assess proposals for the use of this new archive. For further information please contact Alastair Wilson (Alastair.Wilson@glasgow.ac.uk) or Professor Dominique Cadilhac (dominique.cadilhac@monash.edu).

Committee Chair

Dominique Cadilhac, Australia

Executive Members

  • Ann-Sofie Rudberg Sweden
  • Hanne Christensen, Denmark
  • Gary Ford, United Kingdom
  • Anita Patel, United Kingdom
  • Anna Ranta, New Zealand
  • Jeffrey Saver, United States
  • Katarina Sunnerhagen, Sweden
  • Vincent Thijs, Australia
  • Christian Weimar, Germany

Coordinators:

  • Alastair Wilson, United Kingdom
  • Joosup Kim, Australia

Corresponding Members (n=12)

Representing a range of countries including Finland, France, Brazil and Scotland.

Industry:

Matthieu Cuche, Switzerland
Natalia Muehlemann, Switzerland