Wednesday, May 19, 2010

HTAinSite: The NICE Decision Database « OHE News

HTAinSite is a unique resource that enables subscribers to quickly find relevant information on NICE technology appraisal (TA) decisions and the evidence used to support them.  Launched in May 2009, the project is a collaboration involving the OHE, City University London and Abacus International. HTAinSite currently has over 400 registered users; many of the top 20 global pharmaceutical companies are subscribers.

HTAinSite provides a sophisticated short cut to the data necessary for understanding, analysing and comparing NICE decisions on health care technologies. Given the number of technologies that NICE has appraised since its inception in 1999, extracting and assembling the relevant data into a robust overview of decision making and evidence has become a formidable, time intensive task. HTAinSite offers a way round that.

Updated regularly, HTAinSite contains information for all NICE TAs. The service allows subscribers to:

  1. quickly find previous guidance with a simple search engine, filtering by disease category, manufacturer and product name
  2. review a statistical summary of approval rates and the factors that influence approval
  3. print a report containing primary headline guidance for each technology appraisal and product
  4. print an overview of clinical evidence and NICE comments regarding the strength of the clinical evidence supporting their decision
  5. review the cost effectiveness and budget impact data evaluated in the submission
  6. read original NICE documentation to create a detailed review of the guidance

Behind HTAinSite are thousands of hours of work. Each item of data was extracted following a carefully specified protocol, checked, and then validated by an academic panel. The HTAinSite website, designed by Abacus International, provides a user-friendly, flexible tool for searching and displaying NICE decisions

OHE’s Prof Nancy Devlin comments, ‘HTAinSite transforms the ability of health economists and others interested in NICE to quickly drill down into its decision making processes to get the relevant information. It not only provides quick answers to simple questions, but also makes more sophisticated, comparative analyses possible without the tedious and onerous task  of collecting the data from scratch’.

The HTAinSite data base is updated and upgraded continuously, adding both new NICE TAs as they become available and new functionality and tools for analysis.

Visit http://www.HTAinSite.com to view sample reports and subscribe.

This entry was posted on 18 May 2010 at 20:29 and is filed under Health Technology Assessment, NICE. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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