On October 2018, a Technical Cooperation agreement was signed between the Pan American Health Organization/Regional Office of the World Health Organization (PAHO/WHO) and the Epistemonikos Association from Chile, with the objective of promoting, developing and strengthening knowledge translation for its application in Public Health decision making at the regional level.
The terms of the agreement were discussed among the technical teams of the Department of Evidence and Intelligence for Action in Health (EIH), through Dr. Ludovic Reveiz, and BIRME/PAHO/WHO professionals. Strengthening the creation of integrated structures and mechanisms that increase the use of evidence in decision-making processes related to health is one of the key objectives of the agreement.
An expected result from this technical cooperation is the integration of Epistemonikos and the databases of the Virtual Health Library (VHL), coordinated by BIREME/PAHO/WHO, in order to enrich the records available in the VHL with added-value data from Epistemonikos. An example of this integration is to identify, in the VHL, systematic reviews that are also present in Epistemonikos and link them to the associated primary studies, which would allow VHL users to access more records and related information on broad syntheses, systematic reviews and primary studies.
Epistemonikos is a non-for-profit association that has developed a collaborative and multilingual database of evidence in health. It is an important source of relevant systematic reviews for health decision-making and a consistent source of other types of scientific evidence that provides fast and safe access to the best evidence available for issues that arise in real contexts in the health sector.
With this agreement, the following is also intended:
- Strengthen the technical capacity of the decision-makers of the Region, in such a way that decisions are based on evidence;
- Strengthen adequate translation of knowledge from decision-makers in the Region; and
- Develop methodologies to improve knowledge translation, to generating new, useful knowledge for Latin America and the Caribbean.
The agreement between PAHO/WHO and Epistemonikos will strengthen the coutries’ and PAHO/WHO’s capacities and abilities on knowledge translation to promote the use of scientific evidence in health decision-making.