The Innovation Observatory is funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) and hosted by Newcastle University. Established in 2017, we bring together expertise in research, data science and health innovation to identify and assess emerging healthcare innovations, helping health and care organisations prepare for the future.
Our governance arrangements ensure that priorities, resources and delivery are aligned to the needs of the health and care system while maintaining appropriate assurance and public accountability.
Preparing health and care for what's next
The NIHR Innovation Observatory identifies emerging innovations across the global healthcare landscape and transforms them into trusted intelligence that helps organisations anticipate change, make informed decisions and prepare for the future.
Our four horizon scanning programmes span from Priority, Reactive, Proactive, and Demand Signalling. Find out more about how they all work together.
Capacity Building
We are committed to building capability across the health and care system by developing skills, supporting careers and creating opportunities to learn, collaborate and grow.
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.
Connecting the wider community with opportunities to learn, collaborate and develop through fellowships, immersion events, placements and external programmes.
Engaging with a wide range of different audiences
We provide a gateway to collaboration, intelligence, and growth opportunities in healthcare and life sciences.
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.
