How can clinical researchers quantify the value of their proposed comparative research?

A research funder faces the challenge of selecting to fund a small set of studies from a larger pool of proposals, even after proposals achieve the benchmarks of scientific rigor and integrity. Clinical researchers can better quantify the value of their proposed study to facilitate this prioritization process. Value of information analysis can help in this quantification and inform the funder about the population and individual patient-level impact of a comparative research proposal. In this article, we introduce the overarching framework of the value of information to a clinical research audience, identify the steps required to calculate value of information for a proposal, and highlight some software that can be used to readily compute these estimates based on information available for a research protocol.