Patient-centered rapid reviews will drive local decision making: commentary on Hartling et al.

Rapid reviews have attained increasing recognition as a product sought after by decision makers, demonstrated by the February 2015 Rapid Review Summit (https://www. cadth.ca/cadth-summit-series) convened by the Canadian Association for Drugs and Technology for Health (CADTH), which celebrated 10 years of conducting rapid health technology assessments this year. As another example, a recent policy dialogue concluded that there is sufficient appetite in Canada to explore a sustainable rapid response service for decision makers in Canada [1]. Despite their popularity with decision makers and interest in rapid reviews, there is little known about their methods, risk of bias, or utility for decision making. In this issue of JCE, Hartling et al. provide a classification system of four rapid review products on the basis of the extent of synthesis used, providing an advance from previous descriptions of cohorts of rapid reviews [2e4], consisting of: