HTA evidence tables an assessor can trace

Raj leads evidence synthesis at a CRO producing comparative-effectiveness and cost-effectiveness reviews for HTA and payer submissions.

HTA submissions demand a reproducible search, defensible study selection, and comparative evidence an assessor can interrogate. Assembling that across disconnected tools was slow, and defending a specific number meant hunting through spreadsheets and source PDFs.

Paperguide runs the review method in one workspace and ties every extracted value to its source statement, so the comparative evidence is assessor-ready by construction.

Raj’s work is built around a moment that comes long after the review is done: the moment an HTA assessor or a payer’s reviewer questions a single number in the submission. For a review like comparative effectiveness of novel anticoagulants for stroke prevention in atrial fibrillation, the credibility of the whole dossier can hinge on whether his team can immediately show where that number came from.

That single requirement reshapes how he runs the review. He documents screening and exclusion reasons so the study selection itself is defensible, then builds the comparative evidence table his submission needs, comparator, population, primary and safety endpoints, effect size, confidence interval, study quality, applicability, with every value tied to the exact statement in the source paper. When the assessor’s query arrives, answering it is no longer an archaeology expedition through spreadsheets and PDFs; it’s one click to the sentence. Before committing to the full review, he uses a quick cited search to scope how much evidence exists, and journal quality signals help his team weigh study strength during appraisal. When the extraction is done, it exports cleanly into the economic model downstream.

The benefit his team feels is not just speed of assembly, though that improves, but a change in posture: a submission built this way is interrogation-ready by construction, and the reproducibility a payer expects is better than their old spreadsheet process, not a compromise against it.