Guidelines for completing the EURONHEED transferability information checklists

The structure and methods to complete and derive a quality score from the European Network of Health Economic Evaluation Databases (EURONHEED) transferability information checklists for published economic evaluations were reported and discussed in a previous paper (Boulenger et al. in Eur J Health Econ 6, 334–346, 2005). Within the same paper, the use of the checklists was illustrated through their application to a sample of economic evaluations conducted in France and UK. The transferability information subchecklist, consisting of 16 items from the original 42-point checklist, and methods used to derive it, were validated among 16 health economists across Europe participating in the EURONHEED project. Recent correspondence with other researchers, however, indicates that the checklists are now being utilised in empirical work and the methodology of assessing transferability and generalisability. This supplementary paper provides full details of the guidelines that have been developed and recently updated by the authors, such that the overall and subchecklists can be more widely and consistently completed and utilised. We also briefly discuss associated issues such as weighting of items in the checklists and give further clarifications regarding what we consider the most appropriate applications of the checklists to be.