Quantitative Consensus in Systematic Reviews: Current and Future Challenges in Translational Science

Abstract

Translational science conceptualizes healthcare as a concerted set of processes that integrate research findings from the bench to the bedside. This model of healthcare is effectiveness-focused, patient-centered, and evidence-based, and yields evidence-based revisions of practice-based guidelines, which emerge from research synthesis protocols in comparative effectiveness research that are disseminated in systematic reviews. Systematic reviews produce qualitative and quantitative consensi of the best available evidence. The quantitative consensus is derived from meta-analysis protocols that are often achieved by probabilistic approach Bayesian statistical models.