How Bond supercharged research findings in a pandemic

THE NEW TECHNIQUE IS FAST AND – MORE IMPORTANTLY - ACCURATE

By Joanne Crompton

The Covid-19 pandemic sparked a seismic shift in healthcare delivery with governments, the medical profession and patients forced to embrace new ways of accessing diagnosis and treatment.

But one of the most significant changes – the expansion of telehealthwould not have happened as swiftly and safely without a revolutionary approach pioneered by Bond University’s Institute for Evidence-Based Healthcare (IEBH).

In the midst of a global pandemic requiring fast decisions in the face of rapidly changing information, policymakers needed a better way.

The IEBH, led by Professor Paul Glasziou, delivered. With the support of Bond’s Research Enhancement Manager

Justin Clark, his team, and Assistant Professor Anna Mae Scott they crunched the process down to a mere two weeks.

Systematic Reviews are a core element of research regularly used to inform policy and decision-making, but sifting through years, sometimes decades, of scholarship to provide a full and objective view of the evidence on any given issue can take many months.

“It used to be that if you managed to get a systematic review done within a year, you were doing it fast,” says Mr Clark.

“Any faster than that and you had to take shortcuts, which leads to inaccurate information and poor outcomes.”

In a global pandemic where millions of lives were at risk, information was needed quickly and ensuring its accuracy was crucial.

In the five years prior to the pandemic, the IEBH had been developing and testing a suite of tools to speed up each stage of the standard systematic review process, using automation, agile project management strategies and the skills of experienced researchers.

It was this suite of tools that gave the Australian Government confidence that telehealth would keep patients safe.

“When Covid hit and no one could go to hospitals or to their GP, the government needed to know whether and how they should expand telehealth for new services,” says Mr Clark.

“They didn’t know whether it would work, or what it would work for so they wanted to know where telehealth was effective and where it could be safely implemented with no harms to patients.

“So we did nine reviews on a series of different conditions over a period of about three months.”

Most of these conditions had been the subject of decades worth of research so the team was dealing with huge amounts of data that would inform the expenditure of significant public funding.

“It essentially allowed the government to make a decision pretty quickly about where and how it was safe and effective to expand telehealth services,” he says.

“I don’t want to even think about how long that many reviews would have taken without these tools. I can’t think of anyone else in the world who could have done nine reviews in three months, put it that way.”

Mr Clark says the suite of tools