Background
At the February meeting, we decided to conduct a short survey to gather input from SIG members on 2025 targets. The survey aimed to prioritize activities for the coming year based on member feedback.
Survey questions
Survey results
The survey received 29 responses. The box plots below show the distribution of rankings for each proposed activity, where a lower rank indicates greater importance.
Responses to ‘Any other considerations that you want to share?’
- “Just that I found all of the above to be of almost equal importance.”
- “Increase visibility of statistical topics in HTA organisations or at HTA conferences.”
- “In 2025, I think it is important to focus on those areas of HTA statistics which are likely to become more prominent in the face of EU JCA (ITC, establishing surrogacy, establishing clinical meaningfulness, treatment switching, interpretation of low-N analysis). Particularly, I think there is a need to educate on the limitations and interpretations of these analyses, and not simply trust methodology blindly.\nI think there is also scope to increase attention on the statistics used commonly in economic modelling (also ITC, extrapolation, interpretation of post hoc analyses), given its increasing use in Europe and the US”
- “Share insights and learnings about how to strengthen the strategic role of HTA stat. in EU HTA work (early engagement, best practices, …)”
- “I feel that while JCA is important, there are so many other HTA topics that we need to be careful to not lose sight of these too!”
- “some initiatives within the SIG started in 2024 to help us understand how HTA statistics is supported within different companies (e.g., proposed survey). This could be useful for us all to help us consider best practices in how we are positioned and how we work with cross-functional colleagues”
- “Topics about recruitment. How can we better select suitable candidates for HTA statisticians in our companies?”
- “Create working groups within SIGs so that each member can better contribute towards a common goal”
- “Industry benchmark assessment findings…”
- “Discuss role of AI and Automation in work as a HTA statistician”
- “share updates about software development (seeing that openstatsware will be discussed at the next EFSPI stat lead meeting, the topic may gain in importance) \n”
- “I would like to see the ESIG organise more webinars about HTA statistics (both methodological and applied). Perhaps a journal club, with authors invited to speak.”
- “please narrow down the list of activities so there is more focus. its difficult to rank order so many options ; this also waters down the mission of the SIG.”
- “For meeting time, it would be nice to accommodate US attendees.”
Takeaways
- Information sharing (EU HTA and ex-EU HTA) and cross-company collaborations on technical topics were ranked at the top
- General networking and discussions around how to strengthen the role of HTA statisticians were also considered important
Next steps
As one respondent noted, all of the topics are important - but as another noted, we need to prioritize to cater for the limited bandwidth that we all have. This is the point of this ranking exercise.
For the March SIG meeting, we’ll bring a proposal for how to transform your feedback into targets for this year.