Medical Literature Reviews
What types of Medical Literature Reviews does HEA provide?
- Comprehensive Reviews: Comprehensive literature reviews identify, appraise, and synthesize all high quality evidence relevant to a research question. These reviews generally focus on the health economic and humanistic impact of an intervention in a specific therapeutic area, the burden of a particular illness, the epidemiology and current clinical practice patterns (i.e., diagnosis and treatment) for a disease, and/or a summary of an unmet medical need. Comprehensive reviews also include abstraction tables for the key evidence (studies) in the review.
- Expedited Reviews: Expedited Reviews provide quick summaries of what is already known about a specific topic, disease area, or intervention. Expedited Reviews use systematic review methods to search and evaluate the literature, but the comprehensiveness of the search and other review stages may be limited.
What are some benefits of performing Medical Literature Reviews?
- Understand the epidemiology (incidence and prevalence) of a particular disease
- Quantify the humanistic and economic burden of illness including the direct and indirect costs
- Evaluate the competitive landscape and limitations of current interventions
- Guide the design of clinical-economic studies
- Identify GAPs in the medical literature on the economic, clinical, and humanistic impact for particular interventions
- Inform the development of health economic evaluations and model parameter estimates
Approach
- Define the Research Question and Conduct Literature Search
- Select Relevant Studies, Develop Review Protocol, and Assess Study Quality
- Synthesize the Results and Prepare Report
Experience
- Development of medical literature reviews on the costs and outcomes of new interventions, the global epidemiology and burden of illness, the direct and indirect costs of disease, and the competitive landscape and limitations of current interventions in a number of therapeutic and disease areas.
- Clinical areas for literature reviews have included age-related macular degeneration, atopic dermatitis, coronary artery disease, chemotherapy induced anemia, chronic migraine, chronic renal insufficiency, critical limb ischemia, diabetic macular edema, hip arthroplasty, knee arthroplasty, obesity, opioids, osteoarthritis, overactive bladder, perinatal stem cells, peripheral artery disease, post-operative pain management, spinal fusion, and valvular heart disease.
- These medical literature reviews have been used to develop an early understanding of disease landscapes, to support regulatory and reimbursement submissions for new interventions, and to help inform evidence generation activities and publication strategies.