HCBE Faculty Articles
Predicting clinical trial results: A synthesis of five empirical studies and their implications
ORCID
Daniel M. Benjamin0000-0002-0333-5581
Document Type
Article
Publication Title
Perspectives in Biology and Medicine
ISSN
1529-8795
Publication Date
Winter 2023
Abstract/Excerpt
Expectations about future events underlie practically every decision we make, including those in medical research. This paper reviews five studies undertaken to assess how well medical experts could predict the outcomes of clinical trials. It explains why expert trial forecasting was the focus of study and argues that forecasting skill affords insights into the quality of expert judgment and might be harnessed to improve decision-making in care, policy, and research. The paper also addresses potential criticisms of the research agenda and summarizes key findings from the five studies of trial forecasting. Together, the studies suggest that trials frequently deliver surprising results to expert communities and that individual experts are often uninformative when it comes to forecasting trial outcome and recruitment. However, the findings also suggest that expert forecasts often contain a "signal" about whether a trial will be positive, especially when forecasts are aggregated. The paper concludes with needs for further research and tentative policy recommendations.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1353/pbm.2023.0006
Volume
66
Issue
1
First Page
107
Last Page
128
Funding Information
The authors wish to thank Adelaide Doussau, Spencer Hey, Patrick Kane, Mike Yu, and numerous collaborators for contributions to the work covered in this review; the many clinical experts who participated in these studies; and Hannah Moyer and Lily Sefranek for research assistance. This work was funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and Genome Canada.
NSUWorks Citation
Kimmelman, Jonathan; Mandel, David R.; and Benjamin, Daniel M., "Predicting clinical trial results: A synthesis of five empirical studies and their implications" (2023). HCBE Faculty Articles. 1180.
https://nsuworks.nova.edu/hcbe_facarticles/1180
Comments
In the Winter 2023 article by Jonathan Kimmelman, David R. Mandel, and Daniel M. Benjamin, “Predicting Clinical Trial Results: A Synthesis of Five Empirical Studies” (volume 66, number 1, pages 107–28), one of the coauthors’ names was listed incorrectly, as was the copyright notice. These errors haves been corrected in the online edition. Per-spectives in Biology and Medicine regrets these errors.