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.
Not affiliated with or endorsed by the European Union, the European Commission or the HTA Coordination Group.
The JCA Example
Many papers, opinion pieces and summaries have been written about the first joint clinical assessment (JCA) reports published under the EU HTA Regulation. The JCA Evidence Assistant is an Evidence Lake built on those reports. It holds the first four joint clinical assessments, with their summary reports and factual accuracy annexes, and the published methods and procedural guidance.
With it, you can ask the reports and the guidance your own questions, specific to your situation.
- Questions across several assessments. A single question can span all four assessments. The assistant shows each step as it reads the question and searches the documents.
- Citations you can open. Each citation opens a source card with the document's own words, the page, and a link to the publisher's copy at that page.
- Whose statement it is. The answer keeps the developer's statements apart from the assessors', and the final scope apart from earlier proposals. Comments from the factual accuracy annexes are labelled as the developer's text, with the assessors' responses.
- A conversation. Follow-up questions carry the earlier assessments forward, and a conversation can be exported with its sources.
- Guidance as well as reports. Questions about procedure, such as what a manufacturer can change through the factual accuracy check, are answered from the procedural guidance.
- Gaps are stated. When the documents do not hold the answer, the assistant is built to say so and to name what it did find.
- Sources and licences. A statement on sources and licences is one click away. Each source shows its licence status and links to the publisher's copy.
A newly published assessment is added by registering it and running the build again.
See It Work
The demonstration asks a question across the four assessments, follows it with a question about the reasons, answers a procedural question from the guidance, and shows a question the documents cannot answer.
Other Bodies of Evidence
The JCA Evidence 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.
Answers are generated by an AI system from the documents it holds, and the cited source should be checked. This product is an independent tool built on public documents. Not affiliated with or endorsed by the European Union, the European Commission or the HTA Coordination Group.