Target Trial Emulation for Evaluating Health Policy.

ABSTRACT: Target trial emulation is an approach to designing rigorous nonexperimental studies by "emulating" key features of a clinical trial. Most commonly used outside of policy contexts, this approach is also valuable for policy evaluation as policies typically are not randomly assigned. In this article, we discuss the application of the target trial emulation framework in a policy evaluation context. The policy trial emulation framework includes 7 components: the units and eligibility criteria, definitions of the exposure and comparison conditions, assignment mechanism, baseline ("time zero") and follow-up, outcomes, causal estimand, and statistical analysis and assumptions. Policy evaluations that emulate a randomized trial across these dimensions can yield estimates of the causal effects of th

SUBMITTER: Seewald NJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11817613 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature