This week was the official launch of ‘Living Evidence’, an international project where Epistemonikos Foundation holds a key role. The project aims to train different European organisations that work on evidence synthesis to support health decision-making, in using tools and methodologies that will allow them to keep those reviews always updated.
The initiative includes the use of L·OVE Platform, Epistemonikos’ technology, as well as different methodologies and other innovations developed by the Foundation. These tools and expertise will be used to create a methodological framework, to be incorporated into the evidence synthesis processes. This will also optimize the elaboration of instruments that contribute to decision-making, such as clinical guidelines, providing rigorous, always updated evidence.
The ‘Living Evidence’ concept was coined a few years ago, and it refers to the challenge of incorporating evidence into synthesis processes, as it is being produced. Epistemonikos’ Chairman and member of this project as co-researcher, Dr Gabriel Rada, explains that “the evidence synthesis process using living methods allows decisions in health to be informed with the best evidence available. This is even more relevant now, in the context of an evidence production that more grows every day. The Living Evidence project is born right when the need to keep evidence updated to face today’s sanitary challenges, has become very clear”.
The research team includes renowned specialists from Epistemonikos Foundation, Iberoamerican Cochrane Centre, the l’Institut d’Investigació Biomèdica Sant Pau and the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona. This team will be as well advised by a group of international experts, with outstanding careers in scientific research.
Among the organisations that will have some members trained in the project, we can find Vall d’Hebron Hospital, the Hospital Universitario Ramón y Cajal, the Sant Pau Hospital, the Agència de Qualitat i Avaluació Sanitàries de Catalunya, the Servicio Navarro de Salud y and the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) of the United Kingdom.
Dr María Ximena Rojas, from the Institut d’Recerca-Servei d’Epidemiologia Clínica i Salut Pública of Barcelona, leading the project, claims that “one of the biggest challenges that organisations face today is the integration of processes to produce and maintain living evidence in the instruments used to inform decisions in health where evidence evolves constantly”.
‘Living Evidence to Inform Health Decisions, she continues, “is a project that aims to tackle this situation by the development and evaluation of an innovative strategy” with which they will produce living evidence synthesis to incorporate in instruments such as clinical guidelines, sanitary technology assessments reports and structured evidence summaries for health policies.
Dr Camila Ávila, Chief Research Methods Officer in Epistemonikos and lead of the project in the Epistemonikos side, values that “In addition to allowing us to support hundreds of researchers around the world, this initiative will also give us the chance to show our tools to a much wider audience, that we are sure will benefit greatly from the efficiency of our platforms and methods”.
