POSA305 A Systematic Comparison of the Meta-Analysis Software Landscape and Validation of Metaxact for Meta-Analysis of Sparse Outcomes

While meta-analysis has become a prominent cornerstone of scientific medicine in the domain of therapeutics, there is no consensus on which software has the state-of-the-art features to be used for health technology assessment submissions with high degree of methodological comprehensiveness, flexibility, and usability. Furthermore, no systematic evaluation of meta-analysis software has been conducted since 2007 and since then, the meta-analysis software landscape has changed dramatically. The Objectives: of this study were to systematically compare features, flexibility, and usability of MetaXact, RevMan 5.0, Comprehensive Meta-analysis Software, STATA, and R and to validate MetaXact outputs against other meta-analysis software platforms. A list of comparison criteria for features and analytical options was developed using the published literature comparing meta-analysis software platforms. The list of criteria was modified and adapted via a consensus session with meta-analysis experts from the disciplines of health economics and biostatistics. Three investigators compared the features of each software and summarized their findings for basic characteristics, methods, and outputs. Furthermore, a previously published meta-analysis from Nissen 2007 was used as a test case to generate and compare Results: Findings from the analysis were used to validate MetaXact outputs and compare the usability and flexibility of each software. R, STATA, and MetaXact have the most features for analysis settings, numerical methods, graphical output, and sensitivity analysis capabilities. Each software can produce validated and publication ready results; the results of the test-case agreed irrespective of software choice. MetaXact is the only point and click software with capacity to conduct exact analysis; researchers may want to consider using a software platform which can accommodate exact inference in the case of rare events. While meta-analysis software platforms were largely comparable, the more recently introduced MetaXact has comparable features and flexibility for conducting meta-analysis with high usability among the available packages.