Evidence synthesis

One of the main streams of work in the unit is evidence synthesis.

In a collaborative project with University of Edinburgh, we are evaluating the role of IT in improving the quality and safety of health care. Health care today harms too frequently and fails routinely to deliver all its potential benefits. The National Programme for IT in the NHS, delivered through Connecting for Health is revolutionising the delivery of health care. The programme offers a unique and unrivalled opportunity for information communication technologies to improve delivery of effective, patient-centred and safe health care. However, IT also has the potential to introduce risks and compromise quality.

We currently work closely with the Cochrane collaboration on more than a dozen Cochrane reviews of diverse eHealth technologies. This stream of work aims to ensure that new IT solutions proposed or introduced into health systems have a secure evidence-base and evaluative mechanisms in place to ensure that their impact on both quality and safety of services can be assessed. In this way we are assessing the scope for and the theoretical and demonstrated impacts of important cross-cutting themes underpinning eHealth technologies in health care. This work is both important and timely and helps in advancing the unit’s research and innovation strategy.

The unit is also involved in the development of a systematic review methodology. This is intended to address the challenges of conducting as well as critically appraising synthesised evidence in the eHealth field.