Читать книгу Individual Participant Data Meta-Analysis - Группа авторов - Страница 47

IPD meta‐analysis projects cannot be done by a small volunteer review team and usually cost more than a standard systematic review. However, they are considerably less expensive than carrying out a new clinical trial, which may be the only reliable alternative to addressing the research question that the IPD meta‐analysis aims to resolve.

Box 3.3 lists the main costs involved in an IPD meta‐analysis project, and may be useful starting point in preparing a budget and seeking funding. Most items should be self‐explanatory. Some costs are similar to conventional systematic reviews such as those involved in acquiring publications (e.g. inter‐library loan charges) and some aspects of dissemination activity such as open access publishing fees. Additional costs are more specific to individual projects, and largely correlate with the number of trials, complexity of the IPD obtained, and type and number of analyses required, as these are major drivers the staff effort needed.

Funding staff time is likely to be the largest project cost. Whilst the staff resource needed for some tasks will be similar to a conventional systematic review, such as those associated with searching and screening studies for inclusion, other costs will be highly dependent on the size and scope of the project. As described in Section 3.7, sufficient staff time needs to be allowed for checking and recoding variables within IPD and for performing the analyses.

In addition to the time taken to manage and oversee a major research project, the time needed for managing the wider collaborative process, for negotiating data provision, and for communication and collaboration must also be budgeted for, but is easily overlooked. For example, an IPD meta‐analysis project that included IPD from 31 trials involved sending and receiving over 5,000 separate emails.⁷⁹ Given that even the simplest of these probably takes a few minutes to handle, it is not difficult to see how the resource spent on this type of activity mounts up. As managing the collaboration has potential to be sensitive and political, a significant amount of principal investigator time may be needed for communication.