Background: Economic evaluations of health interventions pose a particular challenge for reporting because substantial information must be conveyed to allow scrutiny of study findings. Despite a growth in published reports, existing reporting guidelines are not widely adopted. There is also a need to consolidate and update existing guidelines and promote their use in a user-friendly manner. A checklist is one way to help authors, editors, and peer reviewers use guidelines to improve reporting. Objective: The task force's overall goal was to provide recommendations to optimize the reporting of health economic evaluations. The Consolidated Health Economic Evaluation Reporting Standards (CHEERS) statement is an attempt to consolidate and update previous health economic evaluation guidelines into one current, useful reporting guidance. The CHEERS Elaboration and Explanation Report of the ISPOR Health Economic Evaluation Publication Guidelines Good Reporting Practices Task Force facilitates the use of the CHEERS statement by providing examples and explanations for each recommendation. The primary audiences for the CHEERS statement are researchers reporting economic evaluations and the editors and peer reviewers assessing them for publication. Methods: The need for new reporting guidance was identified by a survey of medical editors. Previously published checklists or guidance documents related to reporting economic evaluations were identified from a systematic review and subsequent survey of task force members. A list of possible items from these efforts was created. A two-round, modified Delphi Panel with representatives from academia, clinical practice, industry, and government, as well as the editorial community, was used to identify a minimum set of items important for reporting from the larger list. Results: Out of 44 candidate items, 24 items and accompanying recommendations were developed, with some specific recommendations for single study-based and model-based economic evaluations. The final recommendations are subdivided into six main categories: 1) title and abstract, 2) introduction, 3) methods, 4) results, 5) discussion, and 6) other. The recommendations are contained in the CHEERS statement, a user-friendly 24-item checklist. The task force report provides explanation and elaboration, as well as an example for each recommendation.

Objectives:The English language is generally perceived to be the universal language of science. However, the exclusive reliance on English-language studies may not represent all of the evidence. Excluding languages other than English (LOE) may introduce a language bias and lead to erroneous conclusions.Study Design and Setting:We conducted a comprehensive literature search using bibliographic databases and grey literature sources. Studies were eligible for inclusion if they measured the effect of excluding randomized controlled trials (RCTs) reported in LOE from systematic review-based meta-analyses (SR/MA) for one or more outcomes.Results:None of the included studies found major differences between summary treatment effects in English-language restricted meta-analyses and LOE-inclusive meta-analyses. Findings differed about the methodological and reporting quality of trials reported in LOE. The precision of pooled estimates improved with the inclusion of LOE trials.Conclusions:Overall, we found no evidence of a systematic bias from the use of language restrictions in systematic review-based meta-analyses in conventional medicine. Further research is needed to determine the impact of language restriction on systematic reviews in particular fields of medicine.

Economic evaluations of health interventions pose a particular challenge for reporting. There is also a need to consolidate and update existing guidelines and promote their use in a user friendly manner. The Consolidated Health Economic Evaluation Reporting Standards (CHEERS) statement is an attempt to consolidate and update previous health economic evaluation guidelines efforts into one current, useful reporting guidance. The primary audiences for the CHEERS statement are researchers reporting economic evaluations and the editors and peer reviewers assessing them for publication.The need for new reporting guidance was identified by a survey of medical editors. A list of possible items based on a systematic review was created. A two round, modified Delphi panel consisting of representatives from academia, clinical practice, industry, government, and the editorial community was conducted. Out of 44 candidate items, 24 items and accompanying recommendations were developed. The recommendations are contained in a user friendly, 24 item checklist. A copy of the statement, accompanying checklist, and this report can be found on the ISPOR Health Economic Evaluations Publication Guidelines Task Force website (www.ispor.org/TaskForces/EconomicPubGuidelines.asp).We hope CHEERS will lead to better reporting, and ultimately, better health decisions. To facilitate dissemination and uptake, the CHEERS statement is being copublished across 10 health economics and medical journals. We encourage other journals and groups, to endorse CHEERS. The author team plans to review the checklist for an update in five years.Health economic evaluations are conducted to inform resource allocation decisions. Economic evaluation has been defined as ''the comparative analysis of alternative courses of action in terms of both their costs and their consequences.'' [1] All economic evaluations assess costs, but approaches to measuring and valuing the consequences of health interventions may differ (see Box). Economic evaluations have been widely applied in health policy, including the assessment of prevention programmes (such as vaccination, screening, and health promotion), diagnostics, treatment interventions (such as drugs and surgical procedures), organisation of care, and rehabilitation. Economic evaluations are increasingly being used for decision making and are an important component of programmes for health technology assessment internationally [2]. Reporting Challenges and Shortcomings in Health Economic EvaluationsCompared with clinical studies, which report the consequences of an intervention only, economic evaluations require more reporting space for additional items, such as resource use, costs, preference related information, and cost effectiveness results. This creates challenges for editors, reviewers, and those who wish to scrutinise a study's findings [3]. There is evidence that the quality of reporting of economic evaluations varies widely and could potentially benefit from improved quality assurance mechanisms [4,5].Wi...