Applications of AI in public health: Improving access to high-quality evidence syntheses

Abstract Issue Using the best available evidence is crucial for effective public health practice. Health Evidence™ provides access to high-quality synthesis evidence relevant to public health. As the volume of peer-reviewed published literature grows, maintaining a database of this magnitude is increasingly resource-intensive. Artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to reduce the maintenance burden thereby ensuring decision makers can easily access high-quality synthesized public health evidence. These innovative strategies may be transferable to enhance efficient maintenance of large curated databases of published literature. Description of the problem In 2020, The Health Evidence™ team conducted extensive training and testing of a supervised machine learning application to explore the accuracy of AI-assisted reference de-duplication and relevance screening. Finding promising results, the team implemented these AI-assisted strategies in August 2020. To assess the impact on the overall screening burden and time saved, implementation data was analyzed between November 2020 to 2023. Results For these 3+ years, AI assisted de-duplication and relevance screening was applied to 394,903 search results. The AI assisted de-duplication application removed 31% (n = 123,903) of references as duplicates. From the remaining reference sets (n = 272,253), the AI assisted screening application removed 70% (n = 190,966) of references as not relevant. Quality assurance spot testing found minimal classification errors (n = 1). In total, AI assisted approaches reduced the need for manual screening by 80%, saving approximately 626 hours of manual screening time over three years (or approximately 17 hours/month). Lessons With the reality of limited public health resources, continued access to high-quality synthesis evidence is critical. Innovative strategies using AI-assisted applications improves the feasibility of maintaining a large database of quality-appraised public health synthesis evidence. Key messages • Access to high quality synthesis evidence is critical for evidence-informed decision making. • Artificial Intelligence can be used to efficiently identify evidence syntheses relevant for public health.