ADDIS: A decision support system for evidence-based medicine

Clinical trials are the main source of information for the efficacy and safety evaluation of medical treatments. Although they are of pivotal importance in evidence-based medicine, there is a lack of usable information systems providing data-analysis and decision support capabilities for aggregate clinical trial results. This is partly caused by unavailability (i) of trial data in a structured format suitable for re-analysis, and (ii) of a complete data model for aggregate level results. In this paper, we develop a unifying data model that enables the development of evidence-based decision support in the absence of a complete data model. We describe the supported decision processes and show how these are implemented in the open source ADDIS software. ADDIS enables semi-automated construction of meta-analyses, network meta-analyses and benefit–risk decision models, and provides visualization of all results.

► We propose the ADDIS decision support system for the evaluation of medicines.
► A unifying data model captures the requirements of evidence-based decision support.
► Decision support in ADDIS is based on the meta-analysis of clinical trials.