Ahead of Our Time: Collaboration in Modeling Then and Now

Published online: 28 June 2017 © Springer International Publishing AG 2017 Dear Editor, We have been heartened to see that so many groups [1-5] are now embracing our admittedly premature idea from 7 years ago, expressed in this journal, regarding "the creation of a collaborative, web-based tool... which could include a registry of healthcare models.where scientists throughout the world could contribute for the greater good in much the way the open-source models used in software design encourage global collaboration and improve software functionality [6]." [...]contrast this to the recent editorial by Bertagnolli and colleagues [7] regarding trying to move the needle on data sharing of clinical trial results-a feat more than 60 years in the coming-and hampered largely by similar forces to those facing the sharing of pharmacoeconomic models, namely, lack of "access to enabling data systems technology, bioinformatics expertise and legal agreements that facilitate sharing." Some of these barriers are slowly being overcome via gatekeeper models (a central repository overseen by an independent expert committee and subject to review of a research proposal), active open-source datasharing models (upload and download of publicly available patient-level datasets, incorporating templates of legal agreements and other documentation to facilitate data sharing) [7], and federated data models (the data requester's analytical programs are copied into the data owner's computer, the programs are run and the aggregated results are sent back to the requester) [8-10].