Article type
Year
Abstract
Background:
This group is bidding for EU Horizon 2020 support (PHC 26 2014) using schizophrenia as an exemplar for all health care. Schizophrenia is a serious mental illness, the cost of which to health services alone is more than all of either cancer or coronary care. Schizophrenia affects one in 25 households and has a profound influence on a person’s ability to think, perceive, feel and move. An enormous effort is invested in producing and maintaining a syntheses of the effects of treatments in the light of valid criticism or new evidence. These highly technical summaries are, however, slow to produce, difficult to personalize and problematic to maintain. In addition, they are often not accessible or acceptable to most clinicians or patients.
Objectives:
To gather a team to create a multilingual, semi-automated system to produce understandable syntheses of best current evidence on interventions for schizophrenia.
Methods:
Since many people (in and out of Cochrane) are working in parallel around the European Union (EU) and elsewhere, gathering a European group together was not difficult. The universal ideas of evolving an automated process which would be supported by a manual quality assurance, based on all extracted data from all the relevant trials (20,000 in schizophrenia), as well as data on economic outcomes and adverse effects were common to many. This team hopes to produce a EU wiki-type repository, acting as a data source for all subsequent processing, auto-data extraction tools for PDFs of trials, and a tested, acceptable, user-interface which can accept personal queries in any language, and summarize and synthesize relevant data to produce reports ‘live’ in any language. It would be free to everyone.
Results:
We do not know now if our bid will be successful. We do know, however, that the vision was not hard to sell to a range of researchers, programmers and small businesses.
Conclusions:
Production of something nimble, attractive and useful is now possible. If we do not do it, someone else will.
This group is bidding for EU Horizon 2020 support (PHC 26 2014) using schizophrenia as an exemplar for all health care. Schizophrenia is a serious mental illness, the cost of which to health services alone is more than all of either cancer or coronary care. Schizophrenia affects one in 25 households and has a profound influence on a person’s ability to think, perceive, feel and move. An enormous effort is invested in producing and maintaining a syntheses of the effects of treatments in the light of valid criticism or new evidence. These highly technical summaries are, however, slow to produce, difficult to personalize and problematic to maintain. In addition, they are often not accessible or acceptable to most clinicians or patients.
Objectives:
To gather a team to create a multilingual, semi-automated system to produce understandable syntheses of best current evidence on interventions for schizophrenia.
Methods:
Since many people (in and out of Cochrane) are working in parallel around the European Union (EU) and elsewhere, gathering a European group together was not difficult. The universal ideas of evolving an automated process which would be supported by a manual quality assurance, based on all extracted data from all the relevant trials (20,000 in schizophrenia), as well as data on economic outcomes and adverse effects were common to many. This team hopes to produce a EU wiki-type repository, acting as a data source for all subsequent processing, auto-data extraction tools for PDFs of trials, and a tested, acceptable, user-interface which can accept personal queries in any language, and summarize and synthesize relevant data to produce reports ‘live’ in any language. It would be free to everyone.
Results:
We do not know now if our bid will be successful. We do know, however, that the vision was not hard to sell to a range of researchers, programmers and small businesses.
Conclusions:
Production of something nimble, attractive and useful is now possible. If we do not do it, someone else will.