Difficulties arising in reimbursement recommendations on new medicines due to inadequate reporting of population adjustment indirect comparison methods

Indirect treatment comparisons are useful to estimate relative treatment effects when head-to-head studies are not conducted. Statisticians at the National Centre for Pharmacoeconomics Ireland (NCPE) and Scottish Medicines Consortium (SMC) assess the clinical and cost-effectiveness of new medicines as part of multidisciplinary teams. We describe some shared observations on areas where reporting of population-adjustment indirect comparison methods is causing uncertainty in our recommendations to decision-making committees when assessing reimbursement of medicines.