CRITICAL APPRAISAL OF MULTIPLE TREATMENT COMPARISONS FOR HEALTH TECHNOLOGY ASSESSMENTS

Format Requirements: The course will cover a number of MTC topics that are particularly relevant to HTAs. Each topic will be introduced in a 30 minute lecture, followed by a 15 minute question round. Throughout the day there will be two interactive sessions where participants are assigned different exercises in critically appraising excerpts from MTCs in HTA submissions. Participants are required to have a basic understanding of the concepts underlying indirect and multiple treatment comparison meta-analysis.

Background: Multiple treatment comparison meta-analysis (MTCs) is a powerful tool for aiding health technology assessment (HTA) agencies in assessing which of the available or new interventions should be indicated for a specific disease of interest. MTCs permit into the relative effects of different medical interventions that have not been compared against each other in clinical trials. MTCs are also highly useful for informing health economic evaluations. It is therefore no surprise that MTCs are becoming widely embraced by HTA agencies. MTCs are, however, conceptually and statistically more complex than conventional systematic reviews including pairwise meta-analyses, and so, the potential to err is greater. Since MTCs will typically (and increasingly) play an important role in decision-making about drug indications, parties involved with health technology assessment (HTA) submission should possess a proper understanding of how to interpret the findings of MTCs as well as an understanding of the existing limitations and potential biases.

Description and Objectives: The objectives of this course is to provide the participants with

1. An introduction to intermediate to advanced issues in MTCs that are particularly relevant to HTA submissions.
2. The basic tools for critically appraising the validity, reliability and robustness of the findings of an MTC.

The course will cover the following topics with particular emphasis on MTCs in HTAs

      a. Brief introduction MTCs and how they are useful in HTAs
      b. Reporting and interpreting comparative effect estimates
      c. Assessing the strength of evidence in a treatment network
      d. Assessing and explaining heterogeneity
      e. Calibrating MTCs and health economic evaluations