Article ID: | iaor201527853 |
Volume: | 248 |
Issue: | 2 |
Start Page Number: | 619 |
End Page Number: | 633 |
Publication Date: | Jan 2016 |
Journal: | European Journal of Operational Research |
Authors: | Birge John R, Ahuja Vishal |
Keywords: | health services, design, learning |
Clinical trials have traditionally followed a fixed design, in which randomization probabilities of patients to various treatments remains fixed throughout the trial and specified in the protocol. The primary goal of this static design is to learn about the efficacy of treatments. Response‐adaptive designs, on the other hand, allow clinicians to use the learning about treatment effectiveness to dynamically adjust randomization probabilities of patients to various treatments as the trial progresses. An ideal adaptive design is one where patients are treated as effectively as possible without sacrificing the potential learning or compromising the integrity of the trial. We propose such a design, termed