Mapping Public Health Policy Options

Background

The increasing volume of public health research challenges policymakers in identifying evidence-informed policy options for improving well-being and reducing health disparities. The government-funded Trials Register of Promoting Health Interventions (TRoPHI) and the Database of Promoting Health Effectiveness Reviews (DoPHER) offered opportunities for facilitating cross-topic learning and exploring feasible interventions for public health.

Aim and Objectives

Our overarching aim is to identify what evidence exists to support the use of different public health interventions to improve health while reducing health disparities.

Objectives:

1. Map which public health policies in DoPHER and interventions in TRoPHI have been evaluated for different health topics
2. Analyse if gaps or trends exist in DoPHER for policy reviews and in TRoPHI for intervention evaluations of particular health topics
3. Explore the distribution of published reviews in DoPHER on reducing disparities across health topics
4. Reflect on challenges and opportunities for using artificial-intelligence-assisted evidence mapping

Methods

Rapid bibliometric analyses of TRoPHI and DoPHER in EPPI-Reviewer were conducted between July and August 2024, covering publications in the last three decades (1995 to 2024). A total of 17279 trials and 356 reviews were included for analysis. Intervention functions were classified into eight groups and health topics into ten categories. The PROGRESS-Plus framework was applied to identify equity-related reviews. We employed a Multi-Label Confusion Matrix to evaluate the performance of GPT-4o-powered automatic classification of health topics in reviews.

Outputs

Evidence Map: intervention functions and health topics of trials within the TRoPHI database, 1995 to 2024
Click here to view the interactive Evidence Map