Scientific Knowledge Accelerator Foundation

We are coordinating a global collaboration to solve a great challenge limiting the speed, accuracy and availability of communicating scientific knowledge. We are defining standards for electronic data exchange (machine-interpretable expressions of precise, unambiguous knowledge about scientific evidence and guidance, especially related to healthcare), and developing tools and communities to facilitate efficient data exchange  throughout the knowledge ecosystem. Once the system and platform is in use it will be self-sustaining. The Elevate Prize funding can be the catalyst to achieve this initial state and thus support a great transformation of science communication.

Brian S. Alper, MD, MSPH, FAAFP, FAMIA had a 25-year mission to provide the most useful support for healthcare decision-making. He founded DynaMed to systematically monitor clinical research and provide decision support for healthcare professionals at the point of care. He scaled DynaMed to employ hundreds of professionals and help millions of people.

Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR), an HL7 standard for the electronic exchange of health data, solves and transforms interoperability challenges for health data. Dr. Alper leads an HL7 project to extend FHIR to Evidence-Based Medicine knowledge (EBMonFHIR). 

In March 2020 Dr. Alper created COVID-19 Knowledge Accelerator (COKA) to organize engagement from multiple organizations and consortia. Societal demands led Dr. Alper to change his mission to enable standard-based machine-interpretable expression of knowledge, especially related to healthcare and scientific evidence.

COKA is creating FHIR standards for Evidence, Statistic, and Citations, and advancing efforts to develop terminologies for EBM and statistics. Dr. Alper created Computable Publishing LLC in July 2020 to develop software and commercially support the overall solution.

In April 2021 COKA leadership created the Scientific Knowledge Accelerator Foundation for the nonprofit oversight and dissemination of the standards and platforms developed for open science communication.

Scientific research findings are reported thousands of times daily in many forms. The complexity and potential for misinterpretation is high so each report is prone to error and enormous amounts of professional effort are applied to reduce error. Determination of best practice for healthcare is delayed by years due to many interchanges to understand and apply scientific findings and the great risks that occur when applied improperly.

There are many systems reporting scientific research findings in electronic form and using structured data which could improve efficiency and accuracy. Any pairwise connection to share data between systems is feasible, but the effort required to map each concept for data schema and terminologies to create automated data transformation tools is too high to expect this development across thousands of systems.

A commonly used standard will enable each system developer to complete one set of automated data transformation tools and reach interoperability with many other systems.

We are addressing this problem with the Technical Innovation of a fit-for-purpose method to create, manage and transmit precise, unambiguous summaries of scientific research findings; and the Social Innovation of achieving universal agreement to use this method as the standard for electronic data exchange for biomedical evidence.

Our Technical Innovation is a fit-for-purpose method to create, manage and transmit precise, unambiguous summaries of scientific research findings. Our Social Innovation is achieving universal agreement for the standard for electronic data exchange for biomedical evidence.

Our work is unique in that we have gathered and support open involvement from all stakeholders -- academia, industry, government and nonprofit -- and make the standard available openly.  Systems that require restrictions to be able to use a standard limit the potential for global adoption of the standard.  There has not been a global standard solution applied to the Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) community spanning original research production, systematic appraisal of the research findings, development of clinical practice guidance, and development of clinical decision support. We have engagement from stakeholders across all aspects of this community including engagement with international organizations that are leaders across the ecosystem.

The solution is disruptive and transformative because electronic communication will no longer be limited to a few systems that have scaled communication barriers (but then restrict use of scaled systems to their limited systems).

Our effort impacts all communities as the evidence specific to the needs of any community will be communicated more efficiently and accurately.

The initial communities of impact are the people evaluating and communicating science for informing healthcare decision support. The people serving these roles are faced with conducting intense and complex work to identify relevant research results, interpret the accuracy and applicability of the results, report their assessments, and provide their analysis and conclusions in ways that facilitate further processing for use in development of clinical practice guidelines, patient decision aids, health policies, and other forms of clinical decision support.

By making this work greatly more efficient and accurate, the knowledge worker community is impacted to process more knowledge with less stress. In turn, better knowledge available faster will impact healthcare communities so patients and citizens receive better healthcare and better guidance for their personal decision-making. The impact is tremendous as healthcare affects everyone.  For obvious reasons we start with COVID-19 as the initial healthcare domain for which we accelerate scientific knowledge communication.