The United States Cochrane Center (USCC) is one of the 14 centers on the world that facilitate the work of the Cochrane Collaboration. The USCC is the reference center for all 50 US states and US territories, protectorates, and districts: the District of Columbia, American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands. The USCC is also the reference Center for the following countries: Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guam, Guyana, Jamaica, Japan, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and Trinidad and Tobago.
Contents
Historical overview
In the United States, there have been four Cochrane Centers since the start of the Cochrane Collaboration in October 1993. The Baltimore Cochrane Center was launched soon after the launch of the Collaboration, officially in 1994, with Kay Dickersin as Director. The San Francisco Cochrane Center was launched soon thereafter, in 1996, with Lisa Bero and Drummond Rennie as Co-Directors. The San Antonio Cochrane Center launched in 1994, with Cynthia Mulrow as Director, and the New England Cochrane Center launched in 1996 With Joseph Lau and Alexia Anczack-Bouckoms as co-Directors. In 1998, Kay Dickersin moved to Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and with the move the Baltimore Cochrane Center was renamed the New England Cochrane Center, Providence Office.
The US centers had variable luck with obtaining sufficient infrastructure funding, and The San Antonio Cochrane Center closed in 2000. In December 2002, the remaining three centers (the New England Cochrane Center at Boston, the New England Cochrane Center at Providence, and the San Francisco Cochrane Center) merged to form a single registered entity with three offices, the US Cochrane Center (the USCC). The Providence office became the first point of contact for the work of The Cochrane Collaboration in the United States and assumed responsibility for fulfilling the core Center functions.
In 2005, Kay Dickersin returned to Baltimore, to take up a post at Johns Hopkins University, and the USCC moved with her. The New England Cochrane Center Boston Office closed in February, 2008. In approximately 2006, Drummond Rennie moved out of the area, leaving his post as SF Branch Director, and Lisa Bero became the Center Director.
In June 2014, the San Francisco Branch of the United States (US) Cochrane Center changed its name to the West Coast Branch of the US Cochrane Center, and because of Lisa Bero’s emigration to Australia, a new Branch Director was announced, Mark Helfand located at Oregon Health and Science University.
Main Tasks
- Supporting Cochrane entities with a coordinating base in the US or one of the countries serviced by the Center. These include: Review Groups, Fields, and Methods Groups.
- Supporting new Cochrane Review Groups (CRGs), Fields, and Methods Groups who want to register with the Collaboration.
- Supporting individuals who seek information about and participation in the work of the Collaboration.
The USCC Main Office in Baltimore
The USCC main office in Baltimore is responsible for providing training and support for review authors, trials search coordinators (TSCs), review group coordinators (RGCs), editors, handsearchers, consumers, healthcare providers, policy makers, and others. In addition the main office of the USCC works with international colleagues to provide training and support for others in the Collaboration who are responsible for training.
CENTRAL
Each Cochrane Center is responsible for a unique function within the Cochrane Collaboration. For twelve years (1994 to 2005) the Baltimore Cochrane Center, and subsequently NECC@P, was responsible for coordinating CENTRAL, The Cochrane Collaboration’s central register of controlled clinical trials. CENTRAL was designed for use by members of the Collaboration’s review groups and others performing systematic reviews. CENTRAL serves both as a repository for trial reports identified by members of the Collaboration and as a source of trial reports from which Review Groups build their specialized registers. In late 1992, work began on development of a register of reports of controlled trials for use in conducting systematic reviews. The first meeting was held and the eligibility criteria were decided at the Cochrane Workshop on “Building a Register of RCTs” at Green College, Oxford, United Kingdom, November 8, 1992 and was attended by Iain Chalmers, Carol Lefebrvre and Kay Dickersin, among others. Definitions and eligibility criteria were decided then that continue to be used to this day.
Although the individuals interested in and key to the developments leading to international registers of randomized controlled trials were also leaders in the Cochrane Collaboration, a larger and more centralized group was felt to be a better location for a common resource. Accordingly, the U.S. National Institutes of Health and specifically the U.S. National Library of Medicine were approached about a partnership. The National Institutes of Health convened a meeting in December 1993 to consider the importance of registers of controlled trials for the promotion of evidence-based health care. One of the outcomes of that meeting was an agreement by National Library of Medicine to retag existing MEDLINE records of reports of RCTs and CCTs, identified by Cochrane collaborators and not already tagged as such, with the publication types (PTs) RANDOMIZED-CONTROLLED-TRIAL (RCT[PT]) and CONTROLLED-CLINICAL-TRIAL (CCT[PT]).
The USCC conducted the “MEDLINE Retagging Project” from 1994-2005 by submitting to MEDLINE all CCTs and RCTs it had identified that were not yet tagged RCT/PT or CCT/PT in MEDLINE. It identified these publications in two ways: (1) collecting on a quarterly basis all CCT and RCT reports newly identified via handsearching by the approximately 50 Cochrane review groups, and (2) identifying all CCTs and RCTs not already identified as such on MEDLINE using electronic search methods. CENTRAL was then created using two sources of information about published trial reports, periodic download of all records in MEDLINE tagged as RCT|PT and CCT|PT and submission of non-MEDLINE eligible citations (e.g., conference abstracts identified through handsearching) by the centers and review groups.
After 1994, when the new publication type tags were initiated, reports of trials missed by NLM’s MEDLINE indexing grew smaller with each year and the NLM decided not to fund the retagging Program after 2005. For the 1994-2005 time period, CENTRAL was funded mainly by the National Library of Medicine, and also by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, The Packard Foundation, and the European Union Biomedical and Health Research Programmes I and II.
Some trials are still missed by the MEDLINE indexers however, and searches of other electronic bibliographic databases are required, so the effort to make CENTRAL a comprehensive database of studies possibly eligible for Cochrane reviews continues. Since 2005, development of CENTRAL has been conducted by Cochrane and John Wiley and Sons, publishers of The Cochrane Library.
Consumers United for Evidence-based Healthcare
Since 2002, the USCC adopted a second unique function, coordinators of a coalition of health and consumer advocacy organizations committed to empowering consumers to make the best use of evidence-based healthcare, Consumers United for Evidence-based Healthcare (CUE). Members of CUE work to strengthen the voice of consumers and provide leadership in healthcare research. Their mission is to promote the health of populations and the quality of individual health care by empowering consumers, public health policy makers, and health care providers to make informed decisions based on the best current evidence through research, education, and advocacy. CUE member organizations are expected to and educate their constituencies about critical appraisal and evidence-based healthcare, using materials gleaned from the CUE website, social networking, training opportunities and networking with other consumer and health organizations. As a condition of membership. CUE members may not receive the majority of the funding from commercial sources and agree to attend an annual CUE meeting to set priorities, receive training, and collaborate with consumer and health advocates throughout the United States. CUE has hosted two Summit conferences, in 2007 and 2010, attended by advocacy groups and others. All of its training materials are available free of charge to the public, for example, training about critical appraisal & evidence-based healthcare, and how the FDA works. CUE also hosts social networking through Facebook groups and Twitter, and CUE contributes its views and support to international projects such as AllTrials. The USCC hosts CUE’s website and resource offerings and coordinates its program of matching educated consumers with researchers and policy makers who wish to incorporate consumers into their programs, for example guidelines developers.
US Cochrane West
The West Coast Affiliate Center operates out of Oregon Health & Science University and University of California, San Francisco. It develops guidance for systematic reviews of complex interventions and realist reviews of health policies.
The Caribbean Branch of the USCC (CBUSCC)
The CBUSCC is the reference center for English-speaking Caribbean territories. Its development extends the services available to Cochrane contributors already working in the Caribbean region and also supports new authors.