Adriani Nikolakopoulou

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.