Enhanced version of Health Systems Evidence being launched at Beijing symposium

October 28, 2012 - The newly enhanced version of Health Systems Evidence will be launched on November 1 at the Second Global Symposium on Health Systems Research being held in Beijing, China.

Health Systems Evidence is already the world's most comprehensive, free access point for evidence to support policymakers, stakeholders and researchers interested in how to strengthen or reform health systems or in how to get cost-effective programs, services and drugs to those who need them.

With the enhancements launched on November 1, Health Systems Evidence will now contain complete inventories of economic evaluations of health system reforms published since 2007, descriptions of health systems around the world, and descriptions of health system reforms. These inventories complement the existing comprehensive inventories of six types of documents related to governance, financial and delivery arrangements in health systems and implementation strategies within health systems:

  • evidence briefs for policy
  • overviews of systematic reviews
  • systematic reviews addressing effectiveness questions
  • systematic reviews addressing a range of other types of questions
  • systematic review protocols
  • registered titles of systematic reviews

The usefulness of the systematic reviews contained in Health Systems Evidence are further enhanced by links to user-friendly summaries written by any of the eight groups in the world writing such summaries for health system policymakers and stakeholders, and by links to all of the studies contained in each review.

These enhancements, like the rest of Health Systems Evidence, are available in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish, and are available free of charge at www.healthsystemsevidence.org. Moreover they ensure that Health Systems Evidence can respond to the full range of questions that health system policymakers and stakeholders may have about health system problems, options to address these problems, and key implementation considerations, and not just what is known about the effectiveness of particular options.

The launch will involve:

  • John Lavis, director of the McMaster Health Forum and co-director of the WHO Collaborating Centre in Evidence-Informed Policy, Canada
  • Yaolong Chen, director of the Evidence-Based Medicine Center, Lanzhou University, China
  • Fadi El-Jardali, associate professor at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon
  • Govin Permanand, technical officer at the Health Evidence Network, World Health Organization Regional Office for Europe
  • Robyn Tamblyn, scientific director of the Institute for Health Services and Policy Research, Canadian Institutes of Health Research
  • Jeremy Grimshaw, co-chair of the Cochrane Collaboration
  • John-Arne Rottingen, visiting professor in the Department of Global Health and Population, Harvard School of Public Health

Registration for Health Systems Evidence is free, and it offers a customizable monthly evidence service that provides information on recently identified research evidence specific to a user’s particular interests. Since re-launching the site as a registration-based service in January 2012, about 3,000 policymakers, stakeholders and researchers from more than 100 countries have signed on to use the site’s advanced search functionality and in-depth instructions about how to make the best use of the site’s capabilities.

Health Systems Evidence will also soon be available through the EVIPNet Virtual Health Library being developed by the Latin American and Caribbean Center on Health Sciences Information (BIREME) with the support of the European Commission-funded Supporting the Use of Research Evidence in African Health Systems (SURE) initiative.