Towards a New Framework for Addressing Structural Uncertainty in Health Technology Assessment Guidelines

Published online: 20 December 2017 © Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2017 1Introduction Providing scientific advice and recommendations for public decision making entails identifying, selecting and weighing evidence derived from multiple sources of information through a systematic approach, while taking into account ethical, cultural and societal factors. According to the latter, all forms of uncertainty are theoretically quantifiable. [...]drug outcomes and health gains based on surrogate endpoints [21, 22], incomplete data generated for the outcomes of medical devices [23, 24] or partial understanding of disease progression [25] put decision makers in a situation in which they must make decisions based on incomplete information. [...]following Strong and Oakley [34], structural uncertainty might be defined as the uncertainty that arises as a result of uncertain model error in relation to the target quantities or more generally the outcomes that the model is trying to predict.