Guy Tsafnat, me, Paul Glasziou and Enrico Coiera have written an editorial for the BMJ on the automation of systematic reviews. I helped a bit, but the clever analogy with the ticking machines from Player Piano fell out of Guy’s brain.
In the editorial, we covered the state-of-the-art in automating specific tasks in the process of synthesising clinical evidence. The basic problem with systematic reviews is that we waste a lot of time and effort in trying to re-do systematic reviews when new evidence becomes available – and in a lot of cases, systematic reviews are out-of-date nearly as soon as they are published.
The solution – using an analogy from Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano, which is a dystopian science fiction novel in which ticking automata are able to replicate the actions of a human after observing them – is to replace the standalone systematic reviews with dynamically and automatically updated reviews that change when new evidence is available.
At the press of a button.
The proposal is that after developing the rigorous protocol for a systematic review (something that is already done), we should have enough tech so that clinicians can simply find the review they want, press a button, and have the most recent evidence synthesised in silico. The existing protocols determine which studies are included and how they are analysed. The aim is to dramatically improve the efficiency of systematic reviews and improve their clinical utility by providing the best evidence to clinicians whenever they need it.
G Tsafnat, AG Dunn, P Glasziou, E Coiera (2013) The Automation of Systematic Reviews, BMJ 346:f139
adam g. dunn 