Trial Forge Guidance 2 helps trial teams decide if another SWAT is needed to answer an existing research question. Five criteria are listed to assist decision making. We are adding a sixth criterion, the Value of Information, to additionally consider the potential time and financial constraints of improving trial process evidence. The Value of Information criterion assesses each trial process based on its value of additional research and value of implementation.
We consider evaluations of recruitment and retention strategies, whose evidence arises from randomised SWATs, as exemplars of how such an approach could be applied to randomised evaluations of trial processes via SWATs. We applied the Value of Information Analysis to recruitment and retention strategies included in the Cochrane recruitment review and the Cochrane retention review and categorised them according to their expected benefits in terms of improved recruitment and retention.
To support the use of Value of Information, we have developed an electronic tool that calculates and presents the criterion results for each available evaluation of recruitment and retention strategies. This will enable trial teams apply the Value of Information criterion, along with the five existing criteria of Trial Forge Guidance 2, when deciding if further SWATs should be conducted for a particular trial process strategy to provide evidence for the strategy’s use, or not during a trial.
The Value of Information tool, an Excel spreadsheet, can be downloaded here.
