Abstract

Background: Network meta-analysis (NMA) has been increasingly adopted worldwide by Cochrane reviews, guideline developers and decision-making bodies to identify optimal treatment choices. However, NMA results are often produced statically, not allowing stakeholders to ‘dig deeper’ and interrogate with their own judgement. Additionally, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, unnecessary or duplicated reviews have been proposed which analyse from the same pool of evidence. We developed the ‘MetaInsight COVID-19’ app as a prototype for an interactive platform to eliminate such duplicated efforts, by empowering users to freely analyse the data and improve scientific transparency.

Methods: MetaInsight COVID-19 (https://crsu.shinyapps.io/metainsightcovid/) was developed to conduct NMA with the evolving evidence on treatments for COVID-19. It was updated weekly between 19th May – 19th Oct 2020, incorporating new evidence identified from a living systematic review.

Results: The app includes embedded functions to facilitate study selection based on study characteristics, and displays the synthesised results in real time. It allows both frequentist and Bayesian NMA to be conducted as well as consistency and heterogeneity assessments. A demonstration of the app is provided and experiences of building such a platform are discussed.

Conclusions: MetaInsight COVID-19 allows users to take control of the evidence synthesis using the analytic approach they deem appropriate to ascertain how robust findings are to alternative analysis strategies and study inclusion criteria. It is hoped that this app will help avoid many of the duplicated efforts when reviewing and synthesising the COVID-19 evidence, and, in addition, establish the desirability of an open platform format such as this for interactive data interrogation, visualisation, and reporting for any traditional or ‘living’ NMA.

Rights

his article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.

Cite as

Xin, Y., Nevill, C., Nevill, J., Gray, E., Cooper, N., Bradbury, N. & Sutton, A. 2022, 'Feasibility study for interactive reporting of network meta-analysis: experiences from the development of the MetaInsight COVID-19 app for stakeholder exploration, re-analysis and sensitivity analysis from living systematic reviews', BMC Medical Research Methodology, 22, article no: 26. http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12874-022-01507-x

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Last updated: 16 June 2022
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