ERICAS

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The aim of ERICAS  (Evidence Review on Cardiometabolic Observational Studies) is to provide a service of seeking and rating contemporary good quality real world evidence on cardiometabolic medicine from published biomedical literature via a web portal and email updates.

Hosted at the LDC the ERICAS team includes experts in database epidemiology, prognostic modelling, decision modelling, evidence synthesis and systematic reviews as well as clinical experts.

ERICAS Process

The ERICAS team retrieve articles using an explicit search strategy developed in collaboration with University of Leicester Library Services.  They then read through the abstracts and exclude any that are not directly related to ERICAS. The team then search for large real-world observational studies and focus on outcomes related to diabetes, cardiovascular disease, mortality and kidney disease :

  • Step 1: The ERICAS statisticians/epidemiologists assess the quality of the retrieved articles using our own bespoke quality assessment tool (Assessment of Real World Observation Studies [ArRoWS]). Only those articles that receive a moderate-to-good rating for producing real-world evidence are sent on to our ERICAS Faculty Members for a clinical review

  • Step 2: They classify journal articles into category and disease area

  • Step 3: ERICAS faculty members rate the articles for their relevance, innovativeness and clinical applicability

  • Step 4: The articles and clinical reviews are published on the ERICAS web portal. Users can subscribe to an alert system to receive information on articles as they published.

For more information please visit: www.ericas.org

ERICAS is funded through an unrestricted educational grant provided by AstraZeneca.

Michael Bonar