What an Evidence Lake Is
We all work across large volumes of documents and data: reports, guidance, notes and slides. Finding the right document, reading it, locating the relevant sections and making sense of them by hand takes a long time.
An Evidence Lake makes a body of documents answerable in plain language. It finds the relevant material, reads it for meaning, brings together what several documents say, and returns an answer that cites its sources, page by page.
The Methods Example
The HTA Methods Assistant answers methods questions from the NICE DSU Technical Support Documents, with page citations.
It is an Evidence Lake built on 27 Technical Support Documents, 4 DSU reports and 11 one-page summaries, with answers that cite the section and the page.
- Streamed answers. The answer appears as it is written, with five progress labels and numbered citations. The sources panel lists exactly the sources the answer cites.
- Gaps are stated. When the documents do not answer, the assistant says so, with "Partly answered" or "Not answered by these documents", and it grades its confidence from what it cited.
- Citations you can open. Each source has an "Open at publisher" link to the publisher's copy at the cited page. The assistant serves no PDFs.
- Sources and licences. Every source shows its credit and its licence status.
- A conversation. Conversations are listed and can be reopened as they were streamed. An answer can be stopped and retried, and a conversation can be exported with its numbered sources.
Other Bodies of Evidence
The HTA Methods Assistant is one example. The same approach applies to other bodies of evidence, such as:
- A compound or a disease area. The evidence package generated around it, made accessible to the teams who need it.
- HTA submissions and decisions. Searchable and comparable across agencies, so the lessons can be drawn out.
- Value communication and value dossiers. A dossier together with the data sources behind it, queried live.
- Literature reviews. The included studies, made answerable in the same way.
HTA Methods Assistant is developed by Aide Solutions LLC. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or produced in association with the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), the NICE Decision Support Unit or the University of Sheffield. The NICE DSU documents are the work of their authors. Each source shows its licence where one applies; documents without an open licence are quoted briefly with acknowledgement and linked to the publisher. Material from other publishers reproduced inside these documents is not covered by their licences. Answers are generated by Aide Solutions' software from these documents and are not NICE or DSU guidance; the DSU documents themselves are not formal NICE guidance. Check answers against the cited source before relying on them.