Before a health economic model is built, desk research has to settle what the model is about: the disease, the patients and the risks and events they face, and the treatments with their adverse events. Concept Design does this desk research with the researcher, who stays in charge. The example in the film is atopic dermatitis in the United States.
You state the research question: the condition, the population, the type of model and the country.
You also set how far back to look in the literature and which organisations to target, such as an HTA body, a regulator or ISPOR. The system then adds a search of that organisation's own website to the literature search.
The system works on its own across six evidence domains, from disease epidemiology to economic evaluations. In the film it identifies 196 sources, keeps 174 after removing duplicates and judges 121 relevant.
It then stops and shows what it found: coverage in each domain, the most relevant articles, and the candidates it excluded before retrieval. You can add your own studies and an intervention document at this point.
It states the decision problem for you to confirm.
The build runs through ten stages. In the film the whole run took about 40 minutes.
The proposal arrives as 42 decisions in five groups. Each one shows its reasons, its evidence references and the alternatives it considered.
You can question the evidence. The answer cites its sources and states what would change under a different choice.
You can make a change. The proposal lists each affected decision, and a side-by-side comparison shows the difference. Nothing changes until you apply it.
Once all decisions are confirmed, your changes are listed with them. Then the concept is written.
The concept is written from the decisions you confirmed. The run in the film ends with 54 sources cited.
The written concept opens into sections. The model structure section includes a table of choices where the evidence differs, with the options seen and the decision for this model.
The first message after writing lists where the evidence points away from one of your decisions. It names the section and the source, and your decision is kept each time.
A change after writing works the same way. It names the decisions and sections it would rewrite, shows the old and new text side by side, and states that the rest of the concept is unchanged.
The Download menu offers seven documents, among them the concept, the disease overview, the list of references and the question and answer record.
The concept document opens with a summary and the population definition, with references numbered in the text. In the disease overview, each statement is referenced.
The list of references marks every source as included in the concept or not. The question and answer record keeps the conversation.
The concept document is the input to Model Specification, the next module.