Cochrane and Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) are delighted to announce the support of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for Cochrane and OHSU's ongoing work to build, pilot, and scale a next generation evidence system to transform the translation of health research into practice. This system is a major component of Cochrane's wider technology development program designed to address the challenge of making sense of an ever-increasing amount of health research and builds on Cochrane’s investment in projects including Linked Data, Project Transform, and review production tools.

The next generation evidence system is developing new approaches including machine learning, crowd engagement and ‘living’ systematic reviews to change the ways health data are used to discover new insights for global health.

“Cochrane is helping to create new ways of synthesising the results of health research and this project will be an important step of that journey.” said Julian Elliott, Co-PI of the project. “These systems will be more efficient and collaborative and enable research to impact on health care in near real time.” 

This project has three components that together make a significant contribution to these novel systems:

1. Building an active online citizen science community who will build skills and contribute to a wide range of 'micro-tasks' required to generate systematic reviews through the Cochrane Crowd platform.
2. Developing, implementing, and validating natural language processing and machine learning systems that semi-automate the extraction of tabular data from research publications.
3. Utilizing the above systems to deliver two exemplar 'living' systematic reviews.

The Foundation will provide a grant to support the work of Cochrane and OHSU teams and partners in the USA, UK, and Australia.

“Systematic reviews that bring the best science to bear on clinical decisions are a cornerstone of patient-centered care,” said Mark Helfand, Co-PI of the project. “ Living systematic reviews offer the best option for a future in which the public contributes to timely reviews that can move the best evidence into practice.”