Making Cochrane Reviews more clinically accessible: the new Cochrane clinical answers derivative product

Tags: Oral
Pettersen K1
1Wiley, UK

Background: One of the Collaboration’s strategic goals is ‘to promote access to Cochrane Reviews and other products of The Cochrane Collaboration’. Cochrane Clinical Answers (CCAs) http://cochrane clinicalanswers.com/aims to provide an entry point to Cochrane Reviews that supports decision-making at the point of care.

Objectives: To develop a new format that brings to the forefront the Population, Intervention, Comparison, and Outcome (PICO) data that allow results of a review to be individualized to the patient.

Methods: Detailed PICO data are extracted from Cochrane Reviews: in terms of population: age, co-morbid conditions; intervention: drug dose, intensity and duration of intervention (walking or kick-boxing?); comparison: with alternative treatment options or with placebo; and outcome—if weight was reduced, how much by, and how long did weight loss take? Finally, can clinicians have confidence that the trial evidence mirrors what will happen in practice?

Results: A key challenge of translating Cochrane Reviews into CCAs relates to the lack of standardized presentation of PICO data. Summary of findings tables greatly facilitate the creation of CCAs and there are many small changes that could be made that would both enhance the user experience of Cochrane Reviews and facilitate usage of Cochrane content in derivative products.