Future Work

We have identified the following areas of future work:

- Trial quality calibration: We need to seek answers to further key questions regarding reliability, safety and trustworthiness of the trial emulation approach by delivering a set of quality indicators and benchmarks for the synthetic data alongside the methods that are designed to evaluate the trial emulation quality with these indicators.

- Bias and uncertainty: The quality calibration needs to indicate when they are likely be inaccurate. This includes potential bias estimation in the presence of uncertainties, such as unobserved confounders and non-identifiable causal relations in the data.

- Further clinical evaluations: The concept needs to be evaluated through a wider set of clinical cases to generate more evidence.

- Working with stakeholders: We need to build a sustainable network community with a wide range of potential stakeholders, including clinical guideline developers, regulators, health professionals, health economists, policy makers and pharmaceutical industry. Clinical guideline developers are among the most direct and relevant stakeholders to benefit from the outcomes of this research.

- Assessments for benefits in a wider context: Future work should move beyond taking only clinical measurements for treatment benefit assessment by supporting benefit estimation in a wider context, including the use of health economic figures and the assessment of efficiency in health services.

More details can be found in Deliverable: Future Roadmap