Guideline developers across the world and across health and clinical disciplines often find it challenging to obtain relevant evidence synthesis to produce guidelines in a timely and high quality manner. While some guideline developers maintain close relations with systematic review groups that can respond to their needs, others do not have these relations and rely on available evidence that often times does not respond exactly to their needs. Establishing inclusive priority setting processes, involving researchers, guideline developers, health care practitioners as well as consumers, is seen as one essential strategy to bridge the gap between evidence synthesis production and evidence synthesis needs.

This Special Session will share, through a series of examples, strategies used to bridge this gap. Examples include technological developments that will speed up systematic review production; strategies that focus on building long-term relationships between guideline developers and systematic review groups; as well as targeted evidence synthesis products developed in response to specific needs.

Presentations:

• Living systematic reviews (Anneliese Synnot) 
• Cochrane Response/Targeted updates (Karla Soares-Weiser) 
• ASH and McMaster collaboration (Holger Schünemann) 
• Cochrane ENT and NICE (Martin Burton) 
• Kaiser Permanente’s use of Cochrane/EPC systematic reviews (Craig Robbins)

The objectives of the session are to:

• Present solutions for bridging the gap between evidence needs and evidence production; 
• Discuss these (and other) solutions and produce actionable suggestions for further decreasing this gap.

The Special Session will be organized jointly by G-I-N and Cochrane.