Table 1. Usefulness criteria item descriptions.
| Clinical utility item | Description |
|---|---|
| Problem base | Health impact depends on prevalence, individual burden, and cost, including common and rare diseases |
| Context placement | Clinical research is most useful when informed by systematic reviews that integrate new findings with existing evidence |
| Information gain | Informative clinical research requires adequately powered studies focused on critical outcomes, avoiding surrogate measures, and integrating results with prior evidence for meaningful practice changes |
| Pragmatism | Pragmatic research evaluates the real-world effectiveness of interventions, emphasizing generalizability and practicality over controlled, ideal conditions |
| Patient-centeredness | Patient-centered research prioritizes questions and outcomes that matter most to patients, involving them in setting priorities and developing core outcomes |
| Value for money | Value-for-money research evaluates the expected benefits of a study against its costs, using analyses like value-of-information and budget impact to guide design and funding decisions |
| Feasibility | Feasibility in research depends on realistic recruitment goals, adequate power, and collaborative networks to overcome challenges like patient availability and overestimated sample sizes |
| Transparency item | Description |
| 8A. Pre-registration | Pre-registration is the process of registering a study in an official registry database before recruiting the first patient |
| 8B. Public protocol | The protocol and data analysis plan should be publicly available before the trial starts and before data analysis |
| 8C. Protocol adherence | Any deviations from the original protocol should be justified, updated in the protocol, and reapproved by the ethics committee, with modification statements included in the manuscript |
| 8D. Funding statement | Funding sources for trial conduction should be clearly stated |
| 8E. Conflict of interest statement | Conflicts of interest should be clearly and completely disclosed |
| 8F. Data availability | Freely available raw data, including statistical code and output, is becoming the norm to ensure transparency, facilitate meta-analyses, and address concerns about study trustworthiness |
Patient-centeredness was satisfied if a trial reported ≥1 outcome relevant to perioperative experience, such as pain, nausea/vomiting, time to ambulation, mobility, functional recovery, or patient satisfaction, while pragmatism required meeting multiple design-related elements.