Research tools
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The following tools support research activities.
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Primary Sense was first developed by Gold Coast Primary Health Network (GCPHN) in 2018 to simplify the process of collecting disaggregated data (e.g., data at the visit or patient level) and improve the quality of data collected for a range of public and population health improvement initiatives.
Since then, Primary Sense has undergone scale development as a national data extraction and clinical support tool, owned by a group of collaborating PHNs nationally and managed by Western Australia Primary Health Alliance (WAPHA).
As of November 2024, Primary Sense is being used by 12 of 31 PHNs nationwide, collecting data for around 12 million patients.
It is anticipated that by 2026, all 7 PHNs in Queensland will be transitioned to the use of Primary Sense.
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To read more about Primary Sense - click here.
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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:
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Word Frequency Analyser - Assists with designing the search strings to find the relevant literature to answer the systematic review question.
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Polyglot Search Translator - Automatically (rather than manually) translates the search string between multiple databases (which have their own syntaxes).
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Deduplicator - Identifies and removes duplicate studies from search results (to decrease the reference screening workload).
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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.
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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).
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Disputatron - Detects screening decision disagreements between reviewers. This speeds up the resolution of the disagreement process.
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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.
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MethodsWizard - A semi-automated tool to guide the systematic review team through the writeup of the methods section of a systematic review protocol.
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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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