New project – Methodological aspects of evaluating transferability of Real World Evidence results between countries / settings
27 Sep 2019

With the increased utility of Real World Evidence, a critical question is the methodological issues of understanding how to transfer the results from a Real World Evidence study in one country to another country. 

In the early scoping review for this project, we found surprisingly few papers discussing the specific sub-question of interest regarding the comparative effectiveness of a drug or intervention. 

It appears that the perspectives from the current discussion would consider the question of transferability either in terms of an individual drug’s effect vs a comparative drug and/or in combination with a broader question about the health care system at a higher level. 

What we mean by this is that for many disease areas, particularly chronic disease and oncology, the way in which health care is provided has a significant impact on outcomes. If this is the case, the question would be how can we compare the differences in care delivery between countries? 

There are many types of studies where the results are more likely to be transferable. Click here to read about an RWE study, comparing two diagnostic methods to guide PCI, which due to the scope of the question would have a high degree of transferability 

There are suggestions that we should use US data-sets to inform decision-makers in Europe regarding the effect of new drugs / interventions. How do we understand if this is a relevant proposition? 

We are proud of the rich data we have in Sweden and the ability to answer important outcome questions. If someone would suggest that this data should be used to answer outcome questions for the US or even another European country it is not obvious. 

If there are disease areas with many country-specific variables, how do we understand the impact of these in relation to the specific outcomes we want to evaluate? 

We believe that this is a crucial topic for us to better understand how decision-makers can increase the utility of Real World Evidence  

We are doing this project in collaboration with Yi Tung Chen who studies Epidemiology at Karolinska Institute. 

We would love to hear your perspective and insight on this so please join the LinkedIn group where we will share more information and hopefully trigger some discussions