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Liverpool Reviews and Implementation Group

Established in 2001, Liverpool Reviews and Implementation Group (LRiG) specialise in systematic review methodologies. We are a dedicated team of experienced health economists, economic modellers, systematic reviewers, and statisticians with expertise in the health economics of pharmaceuticals, disease modelling, and evidence synthesis methodology. With the ethos that good research is conducted by teams rather than individuals, we have fostered many partnerships with clinicians and other research groups and we are proactive in building collaborations.

By conducting systematic reviews and economic evaluations, we produce high-quality, policy-relevant research to facilitate evidence-based decision-making in healthcare.

Our research is mainly commissioned by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) NIHR Evidence Synthesis Programme. This involves conducting clinical and cost-effectiveness reviews of new and existing health technologies on behalf of the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE). We also work on a number of projects such as systematic reviews, economic evaluations and other health technology assessments for a range of research funders and policymakers, such as the World Health Organisation & Cochrane.

We take pride in the impact that our research has on shaping health care policy.  Since 2001, we have carried out more than 500 systematic reviews spanning a wide range of research areas. The findings of these reviews have been widely disseminated, influencing health care practices and producing guidelines for the use of new and existing health technologies, both in the UK and internationally.

Beyond our research work, LRiG offers a variety of tailored continuous professional development and capacity building programmes to support evidence-informed practice in health and social care (see evidence synthesis). We have also published a book on using systematic review methodology in research projects called ‘Doing a Systematic Review: A Student's Guide’.

Our research

The rapid development of new drugs, procedures, devices, and diagnostic tests over the last 50 years has transformed healthcare by enabling healthcare practitioners to get increasingly better outcomes for their patients. However, as healthcare programmes and technologies have become increasingly more complex, their cost has also continued to rise. This has led to difficult decisions for policymakers, who have to assess which technologies or policies will benefit patients the most, whilst balancing their costs against limited healthcare budgets.

To ensure their decisions are fair and justifiable, policymakers make these decisions by considering evidence from research. However, making sense of the evidence is not always straightforward. For anyone health technology, studies with conflicting findings may exist. Some studies may have methodological flaws or may be more optimistically reported than others, making it difficult to draw reliable conclusions.

We produce research that provides policymakers with accessible and highly relevant research-based evidence to guide them in their decision-making. This includes:

  • Methods for considering clinical effectiveness, cost-effectiveness and contextual matters (health policy, equality, ethics, dissemination).
  • Undertaking cost-effectiveness analysis of health technologies (how much value is achieved by a form of care, and at what cost, relative to alternatives). Cost-effectiveness is an important consideration of healthcare practitioners, managers and policy makers.
  • Determining clinical effectiveness of health technologies (how well care works) and placing the results in context for healthcare practitioners or researchers.