Development and Usability Testing of EPC Evidence Review Dissemination Summaries for Health Systems Decisionmakers

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This report is from AHRQ's series on Health Systems Partnership Pilot Project Reports. These reports describe the efforts of Evidence-based Practice Centers (EPCs) to work with health care decisionmakers and facilitate the use of information from AHRQ EPC evidence reports.

Purpose of Project

To evaluate evidence summaries of Evidence-based Practice Center systematic reviews for their content, components, and usability among health systems decisionmakers.

Key Findings

Decisionmakers (i.e., leaders within units of a large health system that help develop and implement evidence-informed health improvement strategies) thought the summaries would be foundational for other products such as clinical pathways.
Decisionmakers preferred a 3-page summary with key messages, details on results, meaningful figures/tables, and strength of evidence; detailed methods and contextual information were less important.
Development of a summary involved about 90 hours of person-time, and required expertise in systematic reviews and meta-analysis, qualitative analysis, and graphic design.
Three-page summaries could be produced for most EPC reports and have value for end-users; however, consideration should be given to their purpose and format (e.g., "one size fits all," tailored for specific decisions).