Protecting Our Health.
Promoting Better Understanding of Evidence.
Reaching the Hearts and Minds of the Public.
About Eviva Partners
The mission of Eviva Partners, in light of the current threat to our health, is to obtain a deep understanding of the threat and develop appropriate strategies and tactics, working with world experts in misinformation research, public health, wellness, political science and other areas.
We envision a world in which patients, providers and stakeholders are equipped and empowered to discuss and evaluate evidence, leading to better healthcare decisions.
Our guiding principles are as follows:
We are a nonpartisan organization. We respect all perspectives and aim to engage broad communities.
We are action-oriented. We aim to implement lasting change through policy.
Learn more about Eviva Partners’ mission, initiatives, and impact.
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Medical research has produced tremendous advances in diagnosis, prevention, treatment and follow-up of disease, collectively referred to as Evidence-Based Practices (EBPs)1. Yet EBPs in routine care are significantly underused by healthcare providers (HCPs) and patients, leading to missed opportunities to improve health outcomes. This problem is known as the implementation gap2. At the same time, widespread overuse of ineffective or harmful interventions leads to enormous wasteful spending3,4. There are nascent efforts at de-implementation of low-value therapies, such as in cancer care, but they are insufficient.5 Both gaps (collectively referred to below as “care gap”) and their underlying reasons remain poorly characterized at the disease and geographic level.
The foundational hypothesis of Eviva Partners is that one key, previously overlooked factor underlies the current challenges of poor and unequal outcomes and rising costs in the US healthcare system: insufficient evidence fluency among patients, providers, and other healthcare stakeholders.
On the patient side, key challenges are poor health literacy6 and numeracy7,8, as well as mistrust9 in science and healthcare.
On the provider side, there is reluctance to discuss uncertainty10, evidence is often not readily available11 or not communicated to patients12–14, and communication training is insufficient15. Incentives are often misaligned. Pharmaceutical and device manufacturers are intensively marketing exorbitantly expensive brand therapies and devices. Even when cheaper alternatives are available, they are not marketed16. Health systems and providers are also incentivized towards costly, revenue-generating treatments and procedures17. Adoption of off-patent, inexpensive yet effective practices is insufficient, left in the hands of individual providers and the nascent and underfunded implementation science community18.
The term “evidence fluency” is introduced by Eviva Partners and is provisionally defined based on the following criteria, subject to additional research and validation:
(1) Understanding the concept of evidence;
(2) Ability to assess strength of evidence;
(3) Ability to detect manipulation;
(4) Ability to discuss evidence with others.
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The mission of Eviva Partners is to reduce the implementation gap and healthcare waste by improving evidence fluency.
We envision a world in which patients, providers, and stakeholders are equipped and empowered to discuss and evaluate evidence, leading to better healthcare decisions.
Our guiding principles are as follows:
We are a nonpartisan organization. We respect all perspectives and aim to engage broad communities.
We are action-oriented. We aim to implement lasting change through policy.
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Improvement in evidence fluency among patients, HCPs and various stakeholders is expected to have the following benefits, to be empirically validated and refined.
a. Patients will be empowered to have more informative discussions with their providers, ask better questions, and make better, more informed, and more evidence-based decisions.
b. Patients may be more likely to adopt evidence-based interventions and less likely to gravitate towards those that are low-value, unproven or harmful.
c. Similarly, increased evidence fluency among healthcare workers, payers, regulators, and administrators will lead to better policy decisions.
d. Collectively this should result in both increased use of EBPs, and reduced use of wasteful interventions, with associated improvement in outcomes and reduced healthcare costs.
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Although beyond the scope for Eviva Partners, beneficial effects of Evidence Fluency beyond healthcare may include:
Creating a unifying, bipartisan movement – the importance of evidence is not controversial and not political.
Elevating the level of debate from searching for “truth” to examining evidence, for example in climate change discussions;
Empowering consumers to have more informed conversations with retail and service providers, etc.
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Several approaches to increasing evidence fluency will be piloted (Figure 1). Each method will be evaluated through Community-based Participatory Research (CBPR) methodology, through focus groups and surveys, assessing acceptability and impact on evidence fluency and other KPIs.
Eviva Team & Advisory Board
Alex Morozov
CEO, Founder
Alex Morozov is a physician-scientist, drug developer and a writer with a passion for improving outcomes of patient communities around the world. He spent about 15 years in the pharmaceutical industry overseeing hundreds of clinical trials of new cancer treatments. Two years ago he started writing a book about medical evidence - what it is and how it works. In the process he met Elder Marshall who inspired him to start Eviva.
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Alex obtained his undergraduate degree from MIT, followed by combined MD-PhD training at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. After completing internal medicine residency at Columbia-Presbyterian and medical oncology fellowship at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, Alex was recruited by a friend to join the pharmaceutical industry. Over his 14-year drug development career, Alex has designed, conducted and overseen hundreds of clinical trials, leading to regulatory approval of several new cancer therapies by the FDA and other health authorities around the world. Following his interest in data and digital innovation, he led teams developing and implementing new technologies to accelerate clinical trials, address health inequity, and improve outcomes, leading to his current role at Pi Health.
Since October 2022, Alex has been working on his first book with a provisional title Evidence: Making Decisions in Medicine, represented by a top literary agency. This book served as the foundation for Eviva Partners.
Stephan Lewandowsky
Professor at University of Bristol
Professor Stephan Lewandowsky is a cognitive scientist at the University of Bristol and the recipient of numerous awards and honours, including a Discovery Outstanding Researcher Award from the Australian Research Council, a Wolfson Research Merit Fellowship from the Royal Society, and a Humboldt Research Award from the Humboldt Foundation in Germany.
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He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Science (UK) and a Fellow of the Association of Psychological Science. He was appointed a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry for his commitment to science, rational inquiry and public education. He also holds a Guest Professorship at the University of Potsdam in Germany.
His research examines people’s memory, decision making, and knowledge structures, with a particular emphasis on how people update their memories if information they consider to be true turns out to be false. His research currently focuses on the persistence of misinformation and spread of “fake news” in society, including conspiracy theories. He is particularly interested in the variables that determine whether or not people accept scientific evidence, for example surrounding vaccinations or climate science.
Dr Lewandowsky has published more than 240 scholarly articles, chapters, and books. His research regularly appears in journals such as Nature Human Behaviour, Nature Communications, and Psychological Review. His research is currently funded by the European Research Council, the EU’s Horizon 2020 programme, the UK research agency (UKRI, through Centre of Excellence REPHRAIN), the Volkswagen Foundation, the John Templeton Foundation (via Wake Forest University’s “Honesty Project”), Google’s Jigsaw, and by the Social Sciences Research Council (SSRC) Mercury Project. Professor Lewandowsky also frequently appears in print and broadcast media and has contributed around 100 opinion pieces to the global media.
Dr. Elder Albert Marshall
Mi’kmaw Nation
Dr Elder Albert Marshall is from the Moose Clan of the Mi’kmaw Nation; he lives in the community of Eskasoni in Unama’ki – Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Albert is a fluent speaker of the Mi’kmaw language, a passionate advocate of cross-cultural understandings and healing and of our human responsibilities to care for all creatures and our Earth Mother.
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Dr Marshall is the author of the “Etuaptmumk / Two-Eyed Seeing” methodology, a guiding principle for the co-learning journey of different cultural knowledges working together. It encourages that we learn to see from our one eye with the best in (or strengths of) the Indigenous knowledges and ways of knowing, and learn to see from the our other eye with the best in (or strengths of) the Western/mainstream knowledges and ways of knowing and, moreover, that we learn to use both these eyes together, for the benefit of all. The Two-Eyed Seeing approach has been the subject of hundreds of scientific publications and has been adopted by researchers and government agencies around the world.
Elder Marshall was born in 1938 in Eskasoni, Unama’ki-Cape Breton. As a young boy, he was taken away from his family and spent many years as a student of the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School on the mainland of Nova Scotia. Albert was profoundly affected by this experience but that has led him on a lifelong quest to connect with and understand both the culture he was removed from, and the culture he was forced into as well as help these cultures find ways to live in mutual respect of each other’s strengths and ways.
Elder Marshall is a member of the Advisory Council for Unama’ki College of Cape Breton University, the Steering Committee for the Collaborative Environmental Planning Initiative (CEPI) for the Bras d’Or Lake, and the Advisory Board for the National Collaborating Centre for Aboriginal Health headquartered at the University of Northern British Columbia. He is the recipient of multiple Honorary Doctorates (Cape Breton University, Acadia University, Humber College) and numerous other awards, including the Order of Canada (2023).
Dr Gordon Guyatt
McMaster University
Dr. Gordon Guyatt is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Health Evidence and Impact at McMaster University. He coined the term “evidence-based medicine” (EBM) in 1991, and since then has been a leading advocate of evidence-based approaches to clinical decision-making. He is one of the world’s most-cited living scientists.
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Guyatt has published more than 1,800 papers in peer-reviewed journals. Overall, his work has been cited, according to the Web of Science, more than 206,000 times and, according to Google Scholar, more than 560,000 times.
Guyatt was the lead editor for the “Users’ Guides to the Medical Literature,” a guide aimed at helping clinicians integrate the principles of evidence-based medicine into their clinical practice. He also played a key role as the lead methodologist in the creation of 19 COVID-19 guidelines, which were developed in partnership with the World Health Organization and the MAGIC (Making GRADE the Irresistible Choice) initiative. “GRADE” refers to a systematic approach to rating the quality of evidence and grading strength of recommendation that Guyatt played a key role in developing and is now used by over 110 organizations worldwide including the WHO, the Cochrane Collaboration, and UpToDate.
Recognition for his work includes the Individual 2022 Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research; his becoming an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2011 and in 2013 the Canadian Institute of Health Research Researcher of the Year. Guyatt has published more than 1,800 papers in peer-reviewed journals. Overall, his work has been cited, according to the Web of Science, more than 206,000 times and, according to Google Scholar, more than 560,000 times.
Guyatt was the lead editor for the “Users’ Guides to the Medical Literature,” a guide aimed at helping clinicians integrate the principles of evidence-based medicine into their clinical practice. He also played a key role as the lead methodologist in the creation of 19 COVID-19 guidelines, which were developed in partnership with the World Health Organization and the MAGIC (Making GRADE the Irresistible Choice) initiative. “GRADE” refers to a systematic approach to rating the quality of evidence and grading strength of recommendation that Guyatt played a key role in developing and is now used by over 110 organizations worldwide including the WHO, the Cochrane Collaboration, and UpToDate.
Recognition for his work includes the Individual 2022 Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research; his becoming an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2011 and in 2013 the Canadian Institute of Health Research Researcher of the Year.
Podcast
The Language of Evidence
The concept of evidence is nonpartisan and not controversial. We all need to dig deeper. Not stopping at our beliefs, but trying to understand what justifies our beliefs - that's what evidence is. It's a language we all need to learn - "The Language of Evidence."
Recent episodes include an interview with Dr Stephan Lewandowsky, a leading cognitive scientist; coverage of the MAHA Alliance press conference; and reflections on the impact MAHA policies may have on the legacy of the conservative movement, once evidence of impact on health outcomes is available.
Every episode is available in 3 forms: video, audio and a transcript with references – see episode description for details.