Accelerating innovation: partnerships drive living evidence
Covidence is a technology company with a mission to change the way the world creates and uses trustworthy knowledge. Our software platform is driving the development of living evidence, the aim of which is to produce evidence summaries that are continuously updated as soon as new data are available.
Guideline developers use living evidence to ensure that their recommendations always reflect the latest research. Giving clinicians and patients high-quality, up-to-date guidelines is a powerful way to improve health outcomes and save lives.
Under the traditional model of guideline development, published evidence can wait for years before being reviewed by a group of experts and incorporated into guidance for clinicians. Policy makers, aware that guidelines may not contain the most up-to-date information, risk placing undue emphasis on single studies. This problem has never been more urgent than during the early response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
For several years, Covidence has partnered with the Australian Living Evidence Consortium to pioneer the living evidence model. Our software enables researchers to integrate new study data into an existing synthesis, reducing task duplication and shrinking the time between the publication of data and its incorporation into a summary that informs policy.
Living guidelines
As part of Covidence’s work to support the Australian National COVID-19 Clinical Evidence Taskforce, we developed specific software features to support the production of living guidelines. The taskforce tested these features and provided us with feedback based on their experience of synthesising a rapidly expanding volume of data during a global health emergency.
Covidence has also partnered with the Australian Stroke Foundation, who used our platform to transform their clinical guidelines for stroke management into living guidelines. They reported a reduction in the median time from the publication of a primary study to its incorporation in a published guideline from 1477 days to 458 days.
Impact on healthcare
How do efficiency gains in guideline development benefit patients? When the Australian Stroke Foundation identified compelling new evidence for the effectiveness of endovascular clot retrieval, they were able to put an updated guideline into the hands of policy makers faster. Because of this, clinicians in Australia got the information they needed on this life-changing treatment sooner, enabling them to prevent death and disability for more people.
Evidence to policy
Living guidelines transform evidence into policy and research into practice. Covidence continues to develop tools to accelerate this process, encourage collaboration and drive efficiencies. At the international level, we take inspiration and encouragement from the work of the Global Commission on Evidence, Cochrane Convenes and the WHO Evidence-informed Policy Network. We are excited about what these partnerships will deliver in the future.
Based on our experiences, Covidence has three tips for effective partnerships.
1. Share a vision
Choose your partners carefully and make sure you have a common goal. Our shared vision for living evidence is a model of living guideline development that can deliver outcomes for clinicians, patients and their families. Covidence’s technology, together with the expertise and experience of our partner organisations, make this possible.
2. Value dialogue
Feedback from our partner organisations has enabled us to refine and improve the living evidence features of Covidence’s software. This improves our product which, in turn, is used by our partners to improve their guideline workflows.
3. Communicate success
Successful partnerships have huge potential to motivate. When we invited the CEO of the Australian Stroke Foundation to speak at the Covidence All Hands meeting, everyone in the organisation was able to see the benefit their work had on improving patient outcomes. Understanding the impact of our shared endeavour has strengthened the partnership and inspired us all to achieve more.
At Covidence we have seen the power of partnerships in enabling the creation and sharing of trustworthy knowledge. We hope that World Evidence-based Healthcare Day generates new ideas, conversations and partnerships for the benefit of patients everywhere.
Disclaimer
The views expressed in this World EBHC Day Blog, as well as any errors or omissions, are the sole responsibility of the author and do not represent the views of the World EBHC Day Steering Committee, Official Partners or Sponsors; nor does it imply endorsement by the aforementioned parties.
