Difficulties arising in reimbursement recommendations on new medicines due to inadequate reporting of population adjustment indirect comparison methods.

ABSTRACT

Indirect treatment comparisons are useful to estimate relative treatment effects when head-to-head studies are not conducted. Statisticians at the National Centre for Pharmacoeconomics Ireland (NCPE) and Scottish Medicines Consortium (SMC) assess the clinical and cost-effectiveness of new medicines as part of multidisciplinary teams. We describe some shared observations on areas where reporting of population-adjustment indirect comparison methods is causing uncertainty in our recommendations to decision-making committees when assessing reimbursement of medicines.