Monash Evidence Review · Evidence synthesis service
Our team turns the research on your question into a rated, decision-ready answer — in as little as one to two weeks. Government agencies, health services and education bodies use our reviews to direct funding, shape policy and design programs with fewer costly surprises.
Your questionWe are restructuring. Does involving affected staff in the design change how many of them leave?
Yes, probably: involving staff early tends to go with fewer people leaving. How big that effect is varies between organisations.
Sample of the format we deliver — not a finding from a completed review.
Sources: Monash Evidence Review Service; Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, 2025.
Proven in use
We have written reviews for government agencies, health bodies and policy schools across Australia. Here is a sample of the decisions they fed into.
We combined the evidence with a national survey and three roundtables of experts and community representatives to rank which research topics mattered most.
OutcomePriorities set for an A$47 million Australian Government research investment.
Source · Monash Sustainable Development Institute ↗How governments drew on public opinion data when setting pandemic policy, and what that means for handling the next crisis.
OutcomePublished by the Australia and New Zealand School of Government as a resource for public-sector leaders.
Source · ANZSOG ↗What helps GPs open — and keep going — the conversations that patients and clinicians both tend to avoid.
OutcomeCommissioned by NSW population health to inform how primary care is supported on sensitive topics.
Source · doi.org/10.57022/rseh3974 ↗A synthesis of the policy options for schools where disadvantaged students are concentrated, with how strong the evidence is behind each option.
OutcomeOptions set out for education policy makers weighing enrolment, funding and support reforms.
Source · Monash Sustainable Development Institute ↗We check our own impact
We ran a follow-up survey covering 19 of our rapid reviews delivered between 2021 and 2023, with 25 client responses, and published the results in a peer-reviewed journal.
The reports were read by the people making the call, not only the team that commissioned them.
Findings were cited in other documents across the client organisation.
The reviews contributed to strategic planning, policy and program funding decisions.
Bragge et al., “What happened next? A survey of review clients evaluating impacts of rapid reviews”, Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, 2025. Satisfaction with report structure and length was rated very high. Project summaries are drawn from the linked public sources.
Why commission a review
A review costs little next to a program, policy or restructure built on the wrong assumption. This is what you get for it.
Put the budget behind options the evidence supports, and pilot the rest. Catching a weak assumption before sign-off costs a fraction of undoing it later.
Rapid formats deliver in 1–2 or 4–6 weeks. We do the searching, screening and appraisal, so your team can keep doing its own work.
Documented searches, stated inclusion rules, and confidence ratings with reasons, signed by a named reviewer. Ready for boards, auditors and ministers.
We co-design the question with you, so the answer fits the decision in front of you rather than the topic in general.
We draw on Monash specialists in health, education, sustainability and behaviour change to interpret findings for your sector.
If the evidence is thin, we say so early and tell you what to measure instead. We will not dress up a guess as a finding.
| Compared with the alternatives | Internal desk scan | Traditional systematic review | Our service |
|---|---|---|---|
| Time to an answer | Days, depth varies | 67 weeks on average¹ | 1–2 weeks to 3+ months, matched to your deadline |
| Framed around your decision | Often | Usually a broad academic question | Co-designed with you |
| Documented, repeatable search | Rarely | Yes | Yes |
| Confidence rating with reasons | Seldom | Usually | Always, in plain language |
| Weighs your data and stakeholders | Informally | Rarely in scope | Where the question needs it |
¹ Mean time to complete and publish, from Borah et al., BMJ Open, 2017 (PROSPERO-registered reviews).
Beyond the literature
Research alone rarely settles an organisational decision. Where your question calls for it, we set the published evidence alongside your own data, your practitioners' experience and your stakeholders' views, and name the weakness of each.
What tends to happen, on average, across many organisations — and roughly by how much.
Watch forClear about organisations in general, quiet about yours.Turnover, absence, incidents, throughput, and how survey answers have moved over time.
Watch forCaptures what is easy to count, not always what matters most.Judgement built by meeting the same problem many times and being corrected.
Watch forLeans on the memorable case, not the common one.What the people affected will accept, resist, absorb or quietly work around.
Watch forThe loudest voice can stand in for everyone.Why you can trust the answer
You learn what the evidence says and also how much weight it can take: act now, act while you measure, or pilot first. We screen thousands of records down to the few that can bear weight, and write down everything we set aside.
The typical shape of a mid-sized review, for illustration.
How we stay fast without cutting corners
Searching, de-duplicating, sorting thousands of abstracts and extracting figures is where reviews lose months. Supervised AI speeds those steps up, and every output is checked against the source. Deciding what the evidence means for you stays with a named person. Select a step to see who does what.
You receive the searches, inclusion rules, every exclusion, the AI models and prompts used, and every reviewer override.
Models draft but never sign. A named reviewer sets each confidence rating and will explain it to your board.
Each conclusion states the strongest case against it, and what new information would change it.
Services
Timeframes are indicative. They depend on how much has been published, how tightly the question can be drawn, and how quickly your team can answer our questions.
A quick map of the existing reviews and key studies on your question, and what they broadly conclude. For decisions already on the agenda.
A focused synthesis with a documented search, quality appraisal and a confidence rating for each finding.
A full protocol, dual screening and quality assessment, for high-stakes questions or work you intend to publish.
We test what the claims in your existing case actually rest on, before it goes up for approval.
Formats combined across a program of work, or training for your analysts until their ratings hold up without us.
Discuss a review
Bring the decision, not a finished research question: scoping it with you is part of the service. The best time to talk is before the business case is signed. A first conversation is free, and if a review won't help, we'll tell you then.
Book a first conversation cong.ngo@monash.edu
Led by Dr Cong Ngo, Monash Evidence Review, who also builds the tools on this site. Enquiries go straight to him, not through an intake team.
You probably need a review if you can't yet answer