The SPOR Evidence Alliance (hereafter, the Alliance) is developed out of Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute at St. Michael’s Hospital. The vision of the Alliance is to create a rapid learning health system where patients receive the right intervention at the right time by facilitating access to high-quality evidence and accelerating its use in decision-making and practice.  The objective of this the Alliance is to establish a national, coordinated alliance in support of systematic reviews, guidelines development and knowledge translation.

The Alliance will be coordinated by a central center, who will match the relevant knowledge synthesis, guideline or knowledge translation method to a query from a

knowledge user.  Subsequently, a center with capacity and expertise in the selected method and content area will be asked to conduct the research and provided with funding accordingly. Knowledge users including patients, clinicians, managers, and policy makers will be involved throughout the research process. Over the next five years, we aim to:

1. Improve patient care, inform policy and practice, strengthen our healthcare system, and increase efficiencies by responding to knowledge user queries related to health and its determinants
2. Strengthen and leverage partnerships between knowledge users and researchers by meaningful engagement throughout the research process from query priority-setting to study conduct, dissemination and implementation.
3. Reduce redundancy and research waste, improve study conduct and accelerate knowledge translation of results across all levels of health through a pan-Canadian alliance using leading-edge science and practice
4. Grow and support the next generation of early career researchers and trainees by providing them with meaningful opportunities to lead projects and work with senior researchers and knowledge users.
5. Increase the profile of Canadian research and advance relevant research methods by leveraging Canadian and international multi-disciplinary linkages with over 100 organizations
6. Increase accessibility and dissemination of research by freely providing all data, research findings, and user-friendly knowledge products on our website
7. Support, reinforce, and strengthen existing Strategy for Patient Oriented Research (SPOR) entities
8. Conduct methods studies to advance the science of knowledge synthesis, clinical practice guidelines, knowledge translation, and patient-oriented research
9. Develop a strategy to sustain our alliance beyond the 5 year funding period

To read more about this integrated knowledge translation approach visit this link on the Open Science Framework.