How to make your research Shiny: An interactive web-based tool for network meta-analysis

Abstract: Network meta-analysis (NMA) is a powerful analysis method used to identify the best treatments for a condition, and is used extensively by healthcare decision makers. Although software routines exist for conducting network meta-analysis, they require considerable statistical programming expertise to use, which limits the number of researchers able to conduct such analyses. Using the existing netmeta and Shiny packages for R, we developed a freely-available web-based tool, MetaInsight, allowing users with only standard internet browser software to be able to conduct NMAs using an intuitive ‘point and click’ interface and present the results using visual plots. We believe our package will be helpful for facilitating NMA as well as allowing decision-makers to scrutinize presented results visually and in real-time. This will impact on the relevance of statistical analyses for healthcare decision-making, and sustainably increase capacity by empowering informed non-specialists to be able to conduct more clinically relevant reviews. It is hoped that others will be inspired to create similar tools for other advanced specialist methods using the freely available technologies we have adopted. This talk will demonstrate the use of MetaInsight, and describe how to develop interactive web-based tools using R to facilitate the translation of complex methodologies for healthcare decision-making.