OBJECTIVES: SLRs are required for submission to health technology assessments to generate evidence. The process for SLRs is time-consuming. Different projects sometimes capture the same citations; however, these repeated citations require duplicate effort to review. We investigate whether an inter-connected database of SLR projects could save time by re-utilizing the review results of the same citations in one project for another.

METHODS: LiveSTREAM is an SLR management tool that uses a constantly updated database of SLR projects. For each SLR project, excluded citations are tagged for population, intervention, outcome, and study design as reason for rejection compared to the inclusion and exclusion criteria. LiveSTREAM saves the inclusion exclusion criteria for all projects and compare them against a new project’s criteria to pre-include or pre-exclude reappearing citations. We conducted a case study to investigate the time savings associated with LiveSTREAM’s reuse of study tagging and inclusion exclusion criteria vs. the normal re-review of overlapping citations between two projects.

RESULTS: A test project in MM maintenance therapy containing 3814 citations was run with or without LiveSTREAM. Without LiveSTREAM, two independent reviewers spent 95 hours on the TiAb review, and a third reviewer spent 6 hours to resolve their conflict, yielding a total of 101 hours of work. With LiveSTREAM, a total of 712 records were automatically reviewed from previously reviewed projects. Of these, 231 were from a project in newly diagnosed (ND) MM, 253 from relapsed/refractory (RR) MM, 12 from ND MM RWE, and 234 from RR MM RWE. 18 of the automatically reviewed records came from multiple projects. A total of 70 hours were spent conducting the TiAb review. Compared to not using LiveSTREAM, 31 hours (30%) of time-savings were generated.

CONCLUSIONS: The LiveSTREAM inter-connected database approach could yield significant time-savings in the TiAb review stage of SLRs.