A Systematic Database Review and Analysis: An ISPOR Special Interest Group Report

Overview

Health economic (HE) models are central to informing healthcare decisions about costs, value, and patient access. In recent years, there has been growing interest in making these models open-source to improve transparency, credibility, and efficiency. Our study, published in Value in Health (2025), provides the first systematic mapping of the global landscape of open-source health economic models (OSMs).

Why It Matters

• Credibility concerns: Closed or proprietary models are often criticized as “black boxes,” limiting trust among decision-makers.
• Duplicated effort: Without open access, analysts frequently “reinvent the wheel” for similar research questions.
• Global relevance: Open-source approaches are increasingly valued for supporting collaboration, reproducibility, and efficiency in healthcare decision-making.

Key Findings

• We identified 174 open-source health economic models.
• 60% were hosted on GitHub, though inconsistent metadata and lack of standardized tagging made them difficult to locate.
• Oncology dominates the field, with 20 models (12% of the total) focused on cancer.
• Quality control is limited: Most models lacked formal validation or transparency about methods.

Integrated Expertise

This research represents a collaboration between experts in academia, industry, and policy, combining diverse perspectives to assess how open-source models can contribute to more transparent and trustworthy healthcare systems.

Conclusions

Open-source health economic models are emerging worldwide, but their potential is not yet fully realized. Greater attention to accessibility, validation, and incentives for sharing is needed to ensure OSMs can improve the quality and efficiency of healthcare decision-making.

To read the full study, click here.