Methods
Frame Research provides rigorous summaries of medical evidence for health care decision-making
What We Do
Each day, thousands of new articles are indexed in PubMed, the National Library of Medicine’s repository of journal citations. Planned and in-process studies in clinical medicine are increasingly searchable thanks to public registries, and these records too are continually updated. Patient-level Big Data in health care, including electronic medical records and claims databases, has opened up still further avenues for retrospective research. It’s difficult just to keep up with this deluge of information, much less distill the messages relevant to specific clinical questions. Approaching all this data with a prospective, reproducible plan is what we do best.
Services
At Frame Research, our name may be a happy coincidence, but it’s true: we have proven expertise in framing research questions – arguably the most critical part of any review. From there we develop a protocol, craft a search strategy, screen through all the citations to identify relevant papers, and finally collate and summarize the results. Our offerings range from full systematic reviews for use in formal meta-analysis, to overviews of therapeutic and disease landscapes, to focused rapid reviews for specific clinical context. In all cases, we use a systematic approach and prospective framework in order to minimize bias.
Systematic Review
Frame Research follows current best practices for systematic literature review such as the Cochrane Handbook and PRISMA guidelines. Our experienced teams begin by drafting a full protocol specifying the patient population, interventions, comparisons, and outcomes of interest (PICO). We create, test, and execute a comprehensive search strategy using electronic databases (e.g. PubMed, EMBASE, CINAHL, Cochrane register) and manual checks of reference lists. Dual screening and data extraction, evidence grading such as Oxford CEBM Levels of Evidence, and a rigorous QC process result in data sets suitable for meta-analysis and publication. We partner with statisticians at CTI and elsewhere to generate conventional, indirect-comparison, and network meta-analyses.
Therapeutic Landscape
We apply a streamlined literature review process to gather evidence on a broad disease setting or landscape of available therapies. Our clients use the resulting evidence catalogs for competitive intelligence assessments, clinical trials planning, context for research manuscripts (introduction / discussion), and post-marketing surveillance of effectiveness, safety, and value. We create custom templates to capture a set of key data elements from each study, enabling efficient and timely updates of the evidence base, and letting us quickly filter down to a set of relevant studies for ad hoc questions. Therapeutic Landscape reviews frequently include searches of meeting abstracts and ongoing trials, to provide the most up-to-date assessment of drug development pipelines.
Rapid Review
Searching the medical literature for studies that have already been conducted is a key step in evidence generation – even for upstream life sciences researchers and patient care providers. When a timely answer to a targeted question is needed, we help you frame and sharpen the question, round up the relevant evidence, and summarize findings in a suitable and actionable format. Our Rapid Reviews are typically a deep dive into a small number of studies which represent the best available evidence. This approach is especially useful for "needle in a haystack" questions involving a specific patient profile, or less-commonly reported outcomes like cost/utilization, long-term survival, quality of life, or rare adverse events. Rapid Reviews can inform health economic modeling, responses to regulatory concerns, and patient navigation.