Satellite events

Meeting Summary/Description: This meeting is open to anyone with an interest in distilling the evidence in our topic areas. Our meeting in Prague is to help formalise our group and bring together a work plan.

Programme Information including times:     

• 1.30 – 3.00pm meeting
• 3-3.30pm Afternoon tea (and networking)
• 3.30-5.00 pm Meeting

Meeting Summary/Description: Network meta-analysis (NMA) is a general term for the statistical methods used to compare multiple treatments and their alternatives simultaneously. NMA’s are often complex and challenging projects. This interactive workshop will provide an overview of NMA methods and its applications including demonstrations of worked examples and hands-on sessions where participants will work through real-world examples.

By the end of the course participants will be able to:

• Understand the concept and the main principles of indirect treatment comparison and network meta-analysis;
• Explain different methods available for indirect comparisons and network meta-analysis;
• Understand the assumptions made in network meta-analysis (heterogeneity, transitivity, consistency) and how to examine them;
• Perform network meta-analysis using Stata, with continuous and dichotomous data;
• Learn different techniques to present the results from network meta-analysis and develop a treatment hierarchy using estimates from network meta-analysis and the certainty of evidence (using GRADE approach).

Speakers: Dr Behnam Sadeghirad, Dr Lawrence Mbuagbaw, Dr Ivan D. Florez

Target Audience: This course is designed for health services researchers, epidemiologists, statisticians, systematic reviewers, and decision analysts.

Learn more about the workshop and registration: https://cpd.healthsci.mcmaster.ca/events/introduction-to-network-meta-analysis-a-hands-on-workshop-in-stata/

For any course related queries, please contact Dr Behnam Sadeghirad (sadeghb@mcmaster.ca) 
 

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Workshop Option 1: Certified Guideline Panel Member + Adolopment Module (8 hour workshop)

• Designed for individuals participating as a member of a Guideline Development Group

Workshop Option 2: Certified Guideline Methodologist Course (8 hour workshop)

• Designed for individuals participating in a Guideline Development Group in the role of an Expert Methodologist

Workshop Option 3: Certified Lead Guidelines Developer and Chair (8 hour workshop)

• Designed for individuals participating in a Guideline Development Group in the role of Chair or Co-Chair

Learn more about the INGUIDE Conference Courses: HERE

For any course related queries, please contact inguide@mcmaster.ca
 

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Meeting Summary/Description: This will be an opportunity for those involved in the automation of systematic review processes to meet to discuss the latest developments

Programme Information including times: 9-5 (provisional)

Speakers: tba

Target Audience: Previous attendees and those involved in automation (whether as developers, users, or policymakers in this area). Please note that the presentations and discussion will assume familiarity with the techniques and debates around automation and may contain technical information.

Where can I sign up: tba

Meeting Summary/Description: EPPI-Reviewer is a cloud-based systematic review platform that supports a wide range of reviews across numerous topics, as well as methodological research in evidence synthesis. It contains features to categorise data and enables reviewers to keep track of decision-making pathways throughout the process. Additionally, it includes cutting-edge machine learning technologies to make the reviewing process more efficient, such as ‘active learning’ for citation screening, ‘classifiers’ helping to retrieve references of a specific type, integration with large language models to assist with information extraction, and integration with OpenAlex that facilitates maintaining living reviews. Finally, EPPI-Reviewer enables reviewers to run meta-analyses, create evidence and gap maps (EPPI-Mapper), and publish online databases of their data (EPPI-Vis). EPPI-Reviewer has been part of the Cochrane ecosystem of tools since 2015 and is available for free for Cochrane and Campbell reviewers.

This workshop aims to introduce attendees to EPPI-Reviewer and its core concepts. By the end of this workshop, participants will gain a solid understanding of how to use EPPI-Reviewer to conduct reviews of various types and will be equipped with practical skills and knowledge to apply different features of EPPI-Reviewer, including machine learning technologies, to their use case.

This session will focus on the key elements of EPPI-Reviewer, its design principles, and latest innovations. The session will provide a comprehensive overview of the software, guide new users through how to get started, and demonstrate how various features of EPPI-Reviewer can enhance and facilitate the review process. The workshop will also include practical exercises and live demonstrations allowing attendees to get a real experience of working with the software and applying machine learning-based techniques to the screening process.

Programme Information including times:

Activities/Interaction Plan:

• Introduction to the facilitators; an online survey on attendees’ experience with digital evidence synthesis tools (5 mins)
• EPPI-Reviewer overview (10 mins)
• Live demonstration of the interface and main features (10 mins)
• Practical task – screening references with the assistance of machine learning (10 mins)
• Live demonstration – classifiers and clustering, automated data extraction (10 mins)
• Practical task – data extraction, reporting, data visualisation (10 mins)
• Q&A (5 mins)

Speakers: Anastasia Koryakina, Sergio Graziosi (EPPI-Centre, UCL)

Target Audience: The workshop is aimed at beginners who have never used any specialised evidence synthesis software as well as experienced systematic reviewers who are interested in innovations in the world of digital evidence synthesis tools. Previous experience with EPPI-Reviewer or any other digital tool for evidence synthesis is not required.

For any queries please contact Anastasia Koryakina at a.koryakina@ucl.ac.uk

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The NIKEZ 2024 Conference is the second annual conference of the National Institute for Quality and Excellence in Healthcare (NIKEZ). NIKEZ is an organizational unit that is a joint workplace of the Ministry of Health of the Czech Republic and the Institute of Health Information and Statistics of the Czech Republic. 

The conference will mainly focus on the main agendas of NIKEZ: 

• Data and information base – the evaluation system is based on the National Health Information System (NHIS), the National Social Information System, the Education Information System, and the CZ-DRG system 
• Standardization of care content and support of integrated care models, primarily developing and implementing Health guidelines and Rapid Recommendations 
• Management of internal evaluation of the quality of care: reporting system, evaluation, and prevention of adverse events, evaluation of patient satisfaction 
• Systems of internal and external data evaluation of health services 
• Institutionalization of assessment with a primary focus on centers of highly specialized care 
• Legislative background 

At the beginning of the conference, there will be a nationwide meeting of representatives of health service providers within the Adverse Event Reporting System. The next part of the conference will focus mainly on the achievements and outputs of NIKEZ to date. The following block will deal primarily with creating guidelines, rapid recommendations, and open data. The last part will be devoted to the status of recommended procedures and operative recommendations in the Czech legal system. 

For more information about the conference and to register, please visit the official website. The link will be available once registration opens.

Please note that the programme is exclusively in Czech and participation is limited to registered participants.

For any course related queries, please contact nikez@uzis.cz