Welcome message from the CEO
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
The countdown to the 23rd Cochrane Colloquium is on! We look forward to welcoming you to the historic city of Vienna in just over a week’s time for a first-class scientific conference that will host many of the world’s leading names in evidence synthesis and evidence-informed health care.
The Colloquium theme of “Filtering the information overload for better decisions” highlights the fact that we are bombarded with an exponentially increasing quantity of information. In the background, data are being collected, stored, saved, and sometimes hidden in such quantities that our ability to process it – to produce valid interpretations of its meaning or usefulness - cannot keep pace. The Colloquium will bring together existing and new ‘Cochrane contributors’ from 60 countries and provides the ideal forum for fostering new ideas and establishing collaborative research links, helping us to build a stronger organisation globally. Our plenaries will focus on the issues thrown up by that information overload: are we part of the problem or the solution? How can we increase transparency in healthcare research? What are the alternatives for ‘designing’ information? Our speakers come from all over the world, and will bring varied and vibrant perspectives to these questions.
Strategy to 2020 challenges us to ensure that Cochrane continues to be at the cutting edge of synthesized evidence: producing products and services that clinicians, researchers, guideline producers, policy makers and patients can use more easily, confident in its quality, accuracy, relevance and timeliness. We’re investing strategically in the IT tools and platforms, and in the training and support for collaborators, that will help us to do this in the next decade. Cochrane is going through exciting change; and we hope that you are able to join the more than 1,300 registered participants in discussing, debating, and creating solutions for making better health decisions in a world of information overload. A full copy of the Colloquium programme is now available to download on the website. Make sure you use your online Colloquium account to sign-up for sessions, meetings, and events. This year we are offering more than 600 workshops, oral sessions, and posters, as well as hosting 110 business meetings for Cochrane Groups and other contributors.
Bis bald!
Mark Wilson
CEO, Cochrane