Scientific models inform healthcare decisions. The Peer Models Network makes those models available to everyone.

Developing clinical prediction and health economic models often involves important value judgments. These models also require significant software, hardware, and computing resources to run— and they generally lack a standardized input/output language. This means healthcare decision models are often inaccessible to the wider community, even when the model source code is publicly available.

Yet the modelling process and its results should be open to everyone with a stake in healthcare decisions. That's why the Peer Models Network strives for innovation in participatory, Open Access modelling.

It starts with a new technical platform called PRISM: the Programmable Interface for Statistical/Simulation Models. PRISM is a software/hardware infrastructure that hosts models on the cloud— and lets users access models with a simple, standard programming language. The PRISM server integrates a RESTful Application Programming Interface (API) infrastructure, JSON for data transfer, a routing layer for access management, container technology for management of computer resources and package dependencies, and the capacity for synchronous or asynchronous model calls.

PRISM makes models accessible to not only users but also other web and computer apps, enabling downstream app development and integration with Electronic Medical Record systems. PRISM is physically hosted at the University of British Columbia Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences and meets all provincial requirements under the Freedom of Information and Privacy Act legislation. With a platform in place to make healthcare decision models fully Open Access, the Peer Models Network aims to find more ways to foster stakeholder involvement in modelling. Check out our YouTube page and follow @PeerModels on Twitter to learn more.