Evidence summaries: the evolution of a rapid review approach

By Sara D. Khangura, Kristin J Konnyu, R. Cushman, Jeremy M. Grimshaw, David Moher. Systematic Reviews, 2012

1,089 citations recorded by the source corpus.

BackgroundRapid reviews have emerged as a streamlined approach to synthesizing evidence - typically for informing emergent decisions faced by decision makers in health care settings. Although there is growing use of rapid review 'methods', and proliferation of rapid review products, there is a dearth of published literature on rapid review methodology. This paper outlines our experience with rapidly producing, publishing and disseminating evidence summaries in the context of our Knowledge to Action (KTA) research program.MethodsThe KTA research program is a two-year project designed to develop and assess the impact of a regional knowledge infrastructure that supports evidence-informed decision making by regional managers and stakeholders. As part of this program, we have developed evidence summaries - our form of rapid review - which have come to be a flagship component of this project. Our eight-step approach for producing evidence summaries has been developed iteratively, based on evidence (where available), experience and knowledge user feedback. The aim of our evidence summary approach is to deliver quality evidence that is both timely and user-friendly.ResultsFrom November 2009 to March 2011 we have produced 11 evidence summaries on a diverse range of questions identified by our knowledge users. Topic areas have included questions of clinical effectiveness to questions on health systems and/or health services. Knowledge users have reported evidence summaries to be of high value in informing their decisions and initiatives. We continue to experiment with incorporating more of the established methods of systematic reviews, while maintaining our capacity to deliver a final product in a timely manner.ConclusionsThe evolution of the KTA rapid review evidence summaries has been a positive one. We have developed an approach that appears to be addressing a need by knowledge users for timely, user-friendly, and trustworthy evidence and have transparently reported these methods here for the wider rapid review and scientific community.

Subfields: General Health Professions, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/aaa8511eab57937ae08503a4d69606a90807ecb8

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In General Health Professions

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Citations in the corpus

Research co-design in health: a rapid overview of reviews (2020, background): “Rapid overviews of reviews are a type of rapid review, an emerging approach to research synthesis that utilises systematic search and appraisal processes but, unlike systematic reviews, focuses on review-level rather than primary studies [16, 17].”
Occurrence, prevention, and management of the psychological effects of emerging virus outbreaks on healthcare workers: rapid review and meta-analysis (2020, methodology): “9 As recommended in rapid review guidelines, 7 we also assessed the level of evidence for the quantitative studies using a modified framework from the Cochrane Musculoskeletal Group.”
Exploring universal design for learning as an accessibility tool in higher education: a review of the current literature (2021, background): “Rapid reviews are a form of knowledge synthesis in which the systematic review process is simplified to produce information in a timelier manner (Khangura et al., 2012).”
Methodology for jbi umbrella reviews (2014, background): “Rapid reviews are essentially a streamlined approach to evidence synthesis in healthcare that attempt to accommodate an evidence informed decision as quickly as possible (Khangura et al., 2012).”
Summarizing systematic reviews: methodological development, conduct and reporting of an umbrella review approach (2015, neutral): “Conduct of an umbrella review may also offer a means for a rapid review of the evidence to address a broad and high-quality evidence base in relation to a topic.(5) Umbrella reviews are conducted to provide an overall examination of the body of information that is available for a given topic, and to”
A critical review of the long-term disability outcomes following hip fracture (2016, methodology): “This review was developed within a rapid time frame and contains many similarities to evolving rapid review methodology [8]; it has a clearly defined review question based on the PICO (Population, Intervention, Comparator, Outcome) criteria, the review question and protocol were developed a priori, ”
A scoping review of rapid review methods (2015, methodology): “Seven publications recommended streamlining the literature search [2, 12, 16, 46, 79, 80, 110] and three suggested restricting the eligibility criteria [2, 12, 80].”
Ecosystem services and the idea of shared values (2016, methodology): “A REA provides an overview of existing research based on systematic searches around a (constrained) topic and a synthesis of the evidence provided by identified studies (DFID, 2015; Khangura et al. 2012).”