Sequential drug decision problems in long-term medical conditions: a case Study of Primary Hypertension Eunju Kim ba, ma, msc

3.2.3Pilot search

A pilot search was carried out to identify studies, which addressed a sequential decision problem in healthcare using a heuristic method. The results of the pilot search were used to develop the search strategies for the full literature search. The generally known terms related to NP-hard sequential decision problem, heuristic methods, optimisation and CEA were used for this pilot search. Target papers were selected if the study addressed ‘A stochastic optimisation problem, which assigns an optimal strategy, such as healthcare policy, diagnosis, treatment or drug dose strategy sequentially, to achieve a treatment goal, using a heuristic or approximate method’. In total nine out of 1,036 studies were selected as target papers. The summary table of the target papers is given in Appendix 2.