Medicine, food, transportation, the science behind critical policies surrounding safety, climate change, and more; you name it, there’s research behind it. And in many cases, a process called a “systematic review” is the gold standard for providing evidence-based results to guide policies.
It involves systematically collecting, screening, and reporting on all available literature on a specific topic to answer a targeted research question. In the past, researchers would manually screen references for relevance, copy and paste data into spreadsheets, and create reports by hand. The process was arduous and error-prone. Today, the increasing demand for evidence-based research requires software that can distill large amounts of information into usable data. Systematic reviews are standard practice for some of the most important research organizations on the planet – and DistillerSR by Evidence Partners is the world’s leading software to do the job accurately and efficiently.
In 2001, EP’s three founders were working on data management software for clinical trials and developed the first systematic review software in collaboration with the CHEO Research Institute. In the years that followed, Evidence Partners was born, based on the vision of a highly configurable systematic review platform that could be used across a broad variety of research protocols. That platform eventually became DistillerSR. The role and use of systematic reviews in evidence-based research has continued to grow rapidly, driving exponential growth in Evidence Partners’ global customer base. What started as a dream to help researchers complete their work more efficiently has turned into the leading software in the systematic review community.
In addition to being home to many of the world’s thought leaders in systematic reviews and healthcare research, Canada, and specifically, Ottawa has also long been a driving force in Evidence-Based Medicine, which involves the use of current best evidence in making decisions that impact individual patients. Prominent researchers in Ottawa have been pivotal in the global effort to increase transparency, validity, and integrity in research, and they have been key in developing tools that have been adopted worldwide to help enhance modern research. Additionally, Ottawa-based researchers have advocated for and increased equity in research and worked towards developing the best methods to take evidence and put it into practice for patients. Their goal is to provide the best information available to guide decision-makers, including policy-makers, physicians, and patients, which is something we can all get behind.
In 2009, DistillerSR was a game-changing software that enabled researchers to put down their pen and paper, retire the timeconsuming and error-prone spreadsheet method, and produce transparent, high quality research in a fraction of the time it used to take. Evidence Partners is now going further by integrating artificial intelligence into the mix. With these innovations, researchers can quality check their work and perform their systematic reviews much faster, which is critical in today’s everadvancing world of medicine and regulatory affairs. The need for evidence is growing at an unprecedented rate, and DistillerSR continues to raise the bar and ensure today’s researchers are supported in all of their essential, often lifesaving, research.
