Using the NMAi Tool to Ease Comparative Analyses of HTAs Among the Nordics

OBJECTIVES: There is an increasing number of Health Technology Assessments (HTAs) in the Nordic countries. HTAs are available at the HTA bodies' websites. Therefore, the data is scattered, and it is time-consuming to find assessments about the same medicine in different countries or among different medicines in the same country. Aiming to aid the search and subsequent analysis of HTAs in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, we have developed NMAi.

METHODS: NMAi tool consists of a database collecting more than 9500 documents from the year 2000 published by The Dental and Pharmaceutical Benefits Agency (TLV) and The New Therapies Council (NT-council) in Sweden, The Norwegian Medical Products Agency (NOMA) and New Methods in Norway, and the Danish Medicines Council (DMC) in Denmark. NMAi allows for the filtering of searches by data range, country, language, category, subcategory, and medicine. Importantly, all the documents are stored in the database. Thus, they can be automatically downloaded from the database without redirecting the user to the HTA agency website.

RESULTS: Accessing all these documents from one unique database allows Health Economics analysts to easily gather different types of information about the assessments for further analyses. Two examples of possible analyses include the comparison of Incremental Cost-Effectiveness Ratios (ICERs) for the same medicine among different countries or for different types of medicines in the same country and the evaluation of the rate of acceptances and rejections of assessments per country.

CONCLUSIONS: Studies performed using NMAi can contribute to the understanding of how HTA decisions affect the access of patients to medicines. In addition, NMAi is constantly developing, future modifications include the use of artificial intelligence using semantic searching. Finally, we believe that in the current European trend towards more unified HTAs, NMAi database will be a useful tool to compare previously published assessments.