Exploratory, Participatory and Iterative Assessment of Value: A Response to Recent Commentaries

We were deeply honoured that so many reputable scholars read our article and took the effort to write no less than eight thoughtful and interesting commentaries.1-8 Writing the original paper was sometimes a struggle, because it was an unconventional paper. However, we felt a strong urge to make these assessments – that are often confidential and not publicly available – public, and share our experiences to advance this important and timely field of research. We hoped that sharing our experiences would fuel the discussions on early health economic modeling, but these eight commentaries exceeded our expectations. We are grateful to the many suggestions for further improvement that were provided, and generally agree with all of them. Many interesting topics were raised that need further attention, such as the use of early health economic modeling within the context of early dialogues with payers and health technology assessment bodies at early stages of product development,1,2 the use of real world evidence,3,8 the complexity of interventions and systems,6 and model quality.