On November 14th, RWE4Decisions hosted its annual Symposium, this year focusing on how to improve decision-making in health technology assessment (HTA) using real-world evidence (RWE). RWE4Decisions is a multi-stakeholder initiative commissioned by the Belgian National Institute for Health and Disability Insurance (INAMI-RIZIV). Aetion has collaborated with RWE4Decisions since 2022 and represents an “Analytics Expert” on the Steering Group.
Most notable at this year’s Symposium was the launch of the 2024 Stakeholder Actions, designed to improve the use of RWE for HTAs for innovative technologies. In 2020, RWE4Decisions published an initial set of actions for each stakeholder group, which includes regulators, HTA bodies/payers, clinicians, patients, registry holders, and analytics experts. However, substantial changes in the decision-making environment and progress in real-world data (RWD) and RWE methods drove the need to update these actions. To address this, RWE4Decisions held stakeholder focus groups, a roundtable, a webinar, and a public consultation, all resulting in the updated 2024 Stakeholder Actions.
As a global leader in RWE technology and analytics, Aetion is committed to collaboration across stakeholders to implement the 2024 Stakeholder Actions. Here are some of the ways that we, as an organization, align with and continue to demonstrate our commitment to progressing the field of RWE and improving its use for HTA decision-making.
RWE4Decisions 2024 Stakeholder Actions for RWD/Analytics Groups
- Action 7.2: Continue to operationalise and share/publish methodologies that address known HTA/Payers’ concerns with use of RWE through HTA-friendly tools, demonstration projects, case studies, etc.
Aetion collaborates with various stakeholders on multiple demonstration projects like our CARE Initiative, which brings together industry and data providers to advance RWE through oncology randomized controlled trial (RCT) emulations. Similarly, we have worked with individual biopharma customers on methods areas that are top of mind for researchers and decision-makers, like the transportability of RWE results across jurisdictions. The goal of these demonstration projects is to help inform best practices in RWE generation and help increase decision-makers’ trust in RWE.
- Action 7.7: Create a standard world-wide library of definitions for key aspects covering diagnoses, outcomes, covariates, etc. and algorithms that have been validated.
Aetion’s Measures Library, a collection of over 1,000 pre-built and customizable measures that can be applied across native data formats and common data models, is a start at consolidating and curating a library of validated and published definitions for real-world data study elements like diagnosis, outcomes, covariates, clinical conditions, treatments, vaccines, etc. Our measures library allows customers and researchers to efficiently run consistent, reproducible analyses and be confident that their studies are measuring what they intend to measure (e.g., defining diabetes consistently across studies and ensuring that patients who are tagged as diabetic are diabetic).
- Action 7.8: Work with industry to ensure they are following published standards/best practices for RWE generation (e.g., transparency, data quality, etc.)
Aetion’s scientific services and analytical workflows follow published best practices—including published frameworks like SPACE, SPIFD, HARPER, and SURF— and customers working with Aetion can be confident that their analysis will meet the highest standards of scientific rigor.
- Action 7.9: Work with data custodians to explain the requirements of decision-makers to clearly demonstrate data quality and encourage standardised documentation they can use for all RWE studies.
Aetion has a vast network of data partners and data-powered offerings to ensure researchers select an accessible, high-quality, and fit-for-purpose dataset for their RWE generation needs. Aetion collaborates with these data partners to push for quality and transparency standards to increase the trustworthiness of RWD.
Aetion was honored to contribute to the creation of the 2024 Stakeholder Actions and to operationalize these actions in our day-to-day work to drive better healthcare decision-making through the use of RWE. We look forward to revisiting the progress on these actions in the coming years.
Contact us to learn more about how Aetion collaborates with global stakeholders to drive innovation, transparency, and trust in healthcare decision-making.