The NIHR Innovation Observatory is a world leading health and care innovation scanning centre, providing data-driven insights to foster innovation and equitable access to high-quality care.
Like all successful organisations the Innovation Observatory is built on the collective effort of a multidisciplinary team. Each member of our internal team plays an important and necessary role in supporting the delivery of our shared vision.
We aim to transform health systems and improve population health by providing advanced data-driven insights that foster innovation and equitable access to high-quality care.
Our core values are the foundation of the work we do, guiding our research and how we work with our collaborators and stakeholders.
A world leading Horizon Scanning Facility
The NIHR Innovation Observatory is a world leading health and care innovation scanning centre, providing data-driven insights to foster innovation and equitable access to high-quality care.
When approaching the near horizon we see healthcare technologies that have already been launched or are undergoing regulatory and technology appraisal processes.
Engaging with a wide range of different audiences
We provide a gateway to collaboration, intelligence, and growth opportunities in healthcare and life sciences.
Industry engagement is a key strand of NIHR Innovation Observatory's work. Our research, publications, data and insights are crucial for both large corporations and small businesses.
Public involvement in research is a valuable way of making sure that the views of people from different backgrounds and with varied experiences help shape the work we do, even if you’ve had no interest in science research before.
We invest in people and support them in realising their full potential. Through nurturing and encouraging career development, we grow future national and international leaders across quantitative and qualitative methods.
Nurturing relationships within the Health & Life Sciences arena
We have a vast network across the sector both nationally and internationally and like to collaborate wherever possible, whether this is with new stakeholders, partner organisations or sharing our knowledge and expertise.
Ensuring that health care innovation of value can realise its full potential is not a task that we undertake alone. We work closely with a range of national stakeholders from the government, regulators, industry, patients, citizens, and the NHS.
The Innovation Observatory is the gateway to the NICE Technology Assessment (TA) Programme for industry, preventing delays in bringing new and repurposed medicines to the UK market through the early identification and tracking of new and repurposed medicines and health technologies.
We build national and international relationships with partners across the Health & Life Sciences Sector. We engage through speaking and attending high profile events and making valuable connections and introductions.
A narrative review of recent tools and innovations toward automating living systematic reviews and evidence syntheses
This narrative review examines software tools that support authors conducting living literature reviews. It summarises automation approaches for different workflow steps, such as literature retrieval or screening.
Living reviews are an increasingly popular research paradigm. The purpose of a ‘living’ approach is to allow rapid collation, appraisal and synthesis of evolving evidence on an important research topic, enabling timely influence on patient care and public health policy. However, living reviews are time- and resource-intensive. The accumulation of new evidence and the possibility of developments within the review’s research topic can introduce unique challenges into the living review workflow.
To investigate the potential of software tools to support living systematic or rapid reviews, we present a narrative review informed by an examination of tools contained on the Systematic Review Toolbox website. We identified 11 tools with relevant functionalities and discuss the important features of these tools with respect to different steps of the living review workflow. Four tools (NestedKnowledge, SWIFT-ActiveScreener, DistillerSR, EPPI-Reviewer) covered multiple, successive steps of the review process, and the remaining tools addressed specific components of the workflow, including scoping and protocol formulation, reference retrieval, automated data extraction, write-up and dissemination of data.
We identify several ways in which living reviews can be made more efficient and practical. Most of these focus on general workflow management, or automation through artificial intelligence and machine-learning, in the screening process. More sophisticated uses of automation mostly target living rapid reviews to increase the speed of production or evidence maps to broaden the scope of the map. We use a case study to highlight some of the barriers and challenges to incorporating tools into the living review workflow and processes. These include increased workload, the need for organisation, ensuring timely dissemination and challenges related to the development of bespoke automation tools to facilitate the review process. We describe how current end-user tools address these challenges, and which knowledge gaps remain that could be addressed by future tool development. Dedicated web presences for automatic dissemination of in-progress evidence updates, rather than solely relying on peer-reviewed journal publications, help to make the effort of a living evidence synthesis worthwhile. Despite offering basic living review functionalities, existing end-user tools could be further developed to be interoperable with other tools to support multiple workflow steps seamlessly, to address broader automatic evidence retrieval from a larger variety of sources, and to improve dissemination of evidence between review updates.
