Dear Developers,

I have been watching with much interest the developments within this software. I am specialist consultant working with multiple pharaceutical, biotech & healthcare organisations in the development of HTA documentations, regulatory reports & licencing submissions. In this context, I become heavily involved in the systematic reviews which forms the platform for this various projects.

For obvious reasons, data extraction as part of a systematic review becomes a labour intensive task for me, & I was wondering how effective EPPI is for this part of the process? I am a seasoned systematic reviewer & have been using the traditional methods in data extraction - so was wondering how much EPPI would help & whether it would at all be possible?

Currently, I have nearly 1000 full text papers (pdf format) from which to extract data. The extraction forms conform to the Cochrane specifications. As an example, I would need to know the number of patients within each comparator arm of the clinical trials indicated within each paper. Is it possible to write a code in EPPI which would then search all 1000 papers & tabulate the number of patients within each comparator arm for all the trials mentioned in the 1000 papers?

If the answer is yes, that would be fantastic as currently the only way for me is to crawl through 1000 papers & visually extract this information from within the text/CONSORT diagram. Also there are large numbers of outcome data within very complex tables within the papers. I need to tabulate all this data so that these can be easily compared & later analysed. At present, the only way is to 'physically trawl' this information & design best tabulations to create the most effective outcomes. Does EPPI provide a better solution?

Kind regards

Mr S K Chatterjee Esq

Capsulation pharma-solutions