Our scientific methods team has been working together with the Standardizing team of Ecuador’s Ministry of Public Health, to optimize their capacities for developing evidence-based clinical guidelines, using both the method curated by Epistemonikos and our technological tools, including the L•OVE Platform and the Epistemonikos Database.

The collaborative project aims to transfer and install knowledge that allows teams to improve their abilities to create evidence-based recommendations, a fundamental task of Health Ministries around the world, and one that in Chile has been supported for more than 3 years by the work of our Foundation.

Our Chief Scientific Innovation Officer, Dr Francsica Verdugo, met in Ecuador with the Standardization National Director of the Ministry of Public Health, Andrés Viteri, and his team, as well as with the General Coordinator of Strategic Development of the Ministry, Rodrigo Henríquez, in the offices of the Pan American Health Organization and Ministry dependencies, to explore new ways in which evidence synthesis applied to decision making can contribute to improving public health. 

“For example, in the acquisition of drugs and other supplies, where decisions on how to prioritize and how to provide safety for the population are vital,” explains Dr Verdugo and ensures that “this methodology for developing clinical guidelines –based on the GRADE methodology and enhanced with our evidence synthesis technological tools and strategies– can help these teams in different ways, even generating new benefits that we can explore and discover by working together ”.

Including training, workshops, and guidance, the project will culminate in the creation and publication of a methodological handbook for the development of clinical guidelines, which will remain as permanent support material for the Ecuadorian team.

In Epistemonikos, one of our main purposes is to contribute to the optimization of evidence synthesis, to be able to adequately inform authorities and citizens decisions regarding individual and public health and well-being. The clinical guidelines contain evidence-based recommendations for health staff, therefore a comprehensive and precise evidence synthesis is required to best ensure the quality of these guidelines. The method used by our scientific research and evidence synthesis team has been in constant refinement for more than 12 years, together with the development of our unique technological tools, which facilitate, give accuracy to and accelerate these evidence processes exponentially.