Adriani Nikolakopoulou
What works best? Methods for ranking competing treatments
Systematic reviews often compare multiple interventions simultaneously. Data from such reviews form networks of interventions and are synthesized through network meta-analysis, a technique which is used to combine evidence coming from all possible paths within the network. The main output of network meta-analysis is the set of all relative effects between competing treatments. A treatment hierarchy is also often of interest and several ranking metrics exist. In this talk I will describe available methods for ranking treatments and a method we developed in order to attach ranking to a clinically relevant decision question. Our approach is a stepwise approach to express clinically relevant decision questions as hierarchy questions and quantify the uncertainty of the criteria that constitute them. I will demonstrate the approach using the R package nmarank, available in CRAN.