Research tools

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The following tools support research activities.

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Primary Sense TM

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The Gold Coast PHN has developed Primary Sense to analyse routinely recorded practice data in real time. Primary Sense is intuitive to use and meets the highest privacy standards. It provides information about the practice population, gaps in care and opportunities to optimise Medicare patient rebates for the highest risk patients. Primary Sense supports medication management by producing intelligent patient safety alerts. Primary Sense can support research by identifying particular patient characteristics, prompt for interventions and evaluate outcomes.

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Systematic Review Accelerator

Online workshops for conducting systematic reviews are run by the Institute for Evidence-Based Healthcare. For information on the next workshops can be seen here.  

The Systematic Review Accelerator (SRA) is a suite of automation tools, purpose-built to speed up multiple steps in the systematic review (SR) process. SRA tools assist with many steps of a systematic review, including searching for citations, citation screening and write-up of review findings, among others. Existing tools are being continuously reviewed and refined, and additional tools are being developed. The SRA tools are freely available for anyone in the world to use. Some of our current tools include:

1. Word Frequency Analyser - Assists with designing the search strings to find the relevant literature to answer the systematic review question.

2. Polyglot Search Translator - Automatically (rather than manually) translates the search string between multiple databases (which have their own syntaxes).

3. Deduplicator - Identifies and removes duplicate studies from search results (to decrease the reference screening workload).

4. RevMan Replicant (Login required) - Automatically writes the results of the systematic review from meta-analyses (forest plots), thus decreasing errors and time to complete the write-up.

5. SearchRefiner - Refines the search strategy so that it is maximally efficient in finding only the relevant literature and leaving out irrelevant literature (decreases the screening workload).

6. Disputatron - Detects screening decision disagreements between reviewers. This speeds up the resolution of the disagreement process.

7. Screenatron - Increases the speed of title/abstract screening by combining customizable hotkeys with a streamlined user interface to allow the reviewer to quickly include or exclude articles.

8. MethodsWizard - A semi-automated tool to guide the systematic review team through the writeup of the methods section of a systematic review protocol.

9. Spidercite - Automatically finds and downloads any citing and cited articles from an uploaded set of studies, used for conducting citation searching.

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Contact the Institute for Evidence-Based Healthcare for more information.

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