Reporting Quality of Discrete Event Simulations in Healthcare-Results From a Generic Reporting Checklist

•Discrete event simulation (DES) is a versatile, individual-level modeling technique that is receiving increasing attention from healthcare researchers and decision makers and has been applied to a broad range of areas beyond health economic evaluation (HEE). To our knowledge, this study is the first in at least the last decade to be dedicated to the appraisal of reporting quality among healthcare-related DES models across this wide spectrum of application areas.•Reporting guidelines and checklists for healthcare modeling studies mainly focus on HEEs, disregarding more than half of the literature, which is focused on other applications such as operations research. To fill a gap in the literature and facilitate a broad approach for assessing modeling reports, an 18-item checklist was developed. It was based on reports from the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR)-Society for Medical Decision Making (SMDM) Modeling Good Research Practices Task Force.•All 211 DES studies included in a previous review were appraised. The present study found that models applied to HEE had a higher mean quality score than other models. It also identified areas with room for improvement, such as model validation. Adherence to the ISPOR-SMDM guidance on model reporting quality should be further enhanced.