Press

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”.

A few weeks ago, the prestigious JAMA Network Journal published an observational comparative study of systematic reviews that revealed the enormous overproduction of evidence on COVID-19, as well as the duplicity of subjects in research and the great problem that this has brought when trying to ensure exhaustivity in evidence synthesis, using traditional synthesis methods.

The study, elaborated by members of the Epistemonikos Foundation team, along with renowned researchers Dr Giordano Pérez-Gaxiola and Dr Iván Flores, compared the great number of systematic reviews about imaging findings of COVID-19 in children. Due to its innovative methods and conclusive results, the study was recently selected by the James Lind Library as a historical record, part of fair testing history. The Library selects and gathers records and scientific articles in order to illustrate the development of fair tests of treatments in health care, giving special relevance to the efforts put on improving method accuracy in scientific research development.

“This means that the scientific community recognizes the issue that we have been coming to identify for a while now, and has been revealed with this pandemic, which is the inability of the traditional evidence synthesis methods to process the huge amounts of information that are being produced on the same subjects”, says Dr Francisca Verdugo, one of the authors and methodologist in Epistemonikos Foundation. Consequently, adds Dr Verdugo, “being considered for this registry is a great recognition of our proposal to face and solve this problem, through collaborative work, technological innovation and the possibility of creating ‘living evidence’ as an input for decision-making”.

Dr Verdugo refers to using the L·OVE Platform in this process, a technological development by Epistemonikos Foundation, which has proven to be one of the most efficient tools for the tasks of searching, gathering and screening the available scientific evidence for a given research question, exceeding the results of conventional methods of evidence synthesis. The combination of methodological innovation and tech development opens a beacon of hope when it comes to this issue, through what these authors have called ‘living evidence’, which is the heart of the efforts registered by the library in this recognition.

Dr Gabriel Rada, co-founder of Epistemonikos Foundation and also a collaborator in the study, is certain that “this pandemic will be surely remembered as one of the periods with the greatest research production about the same subject in history. The amount of evidence produced during the last year about COVID-19 is unprecedented for any scientific subject ever, and thus it requires high levels of innovation and development, that allow researchers to process efficiently this level of information. Thanks to our L·OVE Platform, we can, fortunately, make a useful contribution to this challenge, by providing an efficient and reliable tool that helps tackle important issues like the duplicity of efforts”.