PRISMA Flow Diagram – CAPTIS™ Features

When writing Clinical Evaluation Reports (CERs), one of the core activities that take up the bulk of the total effort is the Systematic Literature Review. Systematic literature reviews are comprehensive and transparent, and typically conducted over multiple databases using a well-defined search and review strategy. You must often screen thousands of research publications in a stepwise approach to assess if any of these have information that can be used as evidence for your device’s safety or performance, or for the State-of-the-Art discussion in your CER.

The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) statement defines an evidence-based minimum set of items that should be used to report systematic reviews and meta-analyses. Your entire systematic literature review process can be documented using a flow chart known as the PRISMA Flow Diagram. It is a dynamic flow diagram that must be revised as the count of the evidence changes.

A PRISMA flow diagram visually summarizes the article screening process. It records the total number of articles found from the initial searches, and then makes the selection process transparent by reporting on inclusion or exclusion decisions made at various stages of the systematic review.

While you can find empty PRISMA templates or even PRISMA Flow Diagram Generators online, the grueling task of keeping a count of the articles at each stage of the review still holds a cushy spot in our 101 Ways to Waste Time in a Systematic Literature Review. No, seriously. How many times have you had to double-take your literature results because your numbers don’t match? You filter your excel sheets a couple of thousand times, perhaps make a pivot table if you’re feeling fancy, only to realize that one of your articles wasn’t appropriately tagged? Manually generating a PRISMA Flow Diagram is time-consuming, inconsistent, and quite frankly, tiresome.

There are a number of pain points associated with manually creating and maintaining PRISMA Flow Charts such as:

• Time Consumption: Preparing a flow diagram for systematic literature review manually is tremendously time consuming, not really a value-added activity for a PhD or a clinician in your team. The time and expertise of these highly skilled resources should be targeted towards actual data analysis versus collection or standardization of data.
• Inconsistency: With the manual process, the flow chart or flow diagram may not be consistent. Human errors are (surprisingly) quite common.
• Tedious Search Activity: With your manual process, you must search individual databases such as Google Scholar, PubMed, Embase, etc., and must select, export, and compile the data into one dataset manually. This can be tedious for your medical writers.

Celegence’s CAPTIS™ technology makes an easy task of systematic literature reviews and also generates a ready-to-use PRISMA flow diagram for your reports. Mid-review changes in the screening strategy, ad-hoc addition of evidence collected outside of the systematic searches, deletion of entire search strings; CAPTIS captures it all, so you don’t have to.

Using CAPTIS™ for Systematic Literature Reviews offers quite a few benefits:

• Improved reporting quality of the systematic review
• Substantial transparency in the selection process of scientific publications
• Automatic monitoring of the flow of articles
• Accurate and error-free PRISMA Flow Diagrams available at the click of a button
• No manual editing/formatting required
• Substantial time savings

Your medical writing team can benefit from CAPTIS™ with faster turnaround times for systematic literature reviews and more accurate end-to-end MDR/IVDR documentation support. To learn more and view a comprehensive demo of CAPTIS™, reach out to info@celegence.com today or contact us online to connect with a Celegence representative.