Public health emergency preparedness and response depends on fast, practical, and trustworthy information. Yet the evidence that supports preparedness work is often difficult to find, hard to compare, and not always written for the practitioners who need to use it.
The NYC Preparedness & Recovery Institute (PRI) developed EvidenceLink to help address this challenge.
EvidenceLink is a searchable resource for researchers and practitioners working in public health emergency preparedness and response. It identifies peer-reviewed articles about interventions that have been tested, summarizes what those studies found, and helps users understand how the evidence may apply to real-world preparedness and recovery work. The resource was developed by PRI, with support from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as part of PRI’s role as the coordinating technical assistance partner, in collaboration with researchers, subject matter experts, public health partners, and the Regional Centers for Public Health Preparedness and Response.
The Problem: Public Health Has an Emergency Evidence Gap
Public health practitioners are often asked to make decisions in complex, high-pressure environments. They need to know what has worked, what has not, and what can be adapted for their communities. But the evidence base for public health emergency preparedness and response is not always easy to use. Research is spread across journals and databases. Studies use different methods, outcomes, and terminology. Some focus on whether an intervention was effective. Others focus on how it was implemented, whether it was feasible, or what made it work in a specific setting.
For practitioners, this creates a know/do gap: useful research may exist, but it can be difficult to find, interpret, and translate into action. EvidenceLink was created to help close that gap. Its short-term goal is to provide public health professionals with information they can use to understand the current state of the evidence and apply it when it is relevant and fit for purpose. Its long-term goal is to help practitioners design, adapt, improve, and evaluate interventions by making evidence easier to find and use.
What EvidenceLink Does
EvidenceLink organizes peer-reviewed literature on public health emergency preparedness and response interventions into a practical, searchable database. Users can search by keyword or filter articles by categories such as publication year, intervention area, target population, intervention target level, disaster type, study type, study design, study outcomes, and whether an intervention was deemed effective. Each article page is designed to provide key information at a glance, including a citation, key study and intervention characteristics,, a link to the article, and a short plain-language summary written for preparedness practitioners. The resource was designed to be accessible, user-friendly, searchable, exportable, and able to support AI integration.
How EvidenceLink Defines and Organizes Evidence
A central challenge in building EvidenceLink was deciding what counts as useful evidence for public health emergency preparedness and response. EvidenceLink uses eligibility criteria developed with the Evidence Workgroup and CDC input. These criteria were designed to capture two complementary types of evidence: effectiveness evidence and contextual evidence.
Effectiveness evidence helps answer whether an intervention works. It focuses on studies that assess efficacy or effectiveness and use methods such as randomized allocation, quasi-experimental designs, systematic reviews, or meta-analyses. Articles are identified as effective when the intervention or strategy described was evaluated and demonstrated as effective using statistical testing.
Contextual evidence helps explain how an intervention works, under what circumstances, and what factors influence implementation, adaptation, feasibility, acceptability, fidelity, quality improvement, and program evaluation. This allows EvidenceLink to include studies that may not prove effectiveness in a narrow statistical sense, but still provide important lessons for practice.
How the Database Was Built
EvidenceLink was developed through a structured search and review process. The team searched major citation databases, including PubMed, EBSCO, Web of Science, and Scopus, to identify peer-reviewed articles that met eligibility criteria. The initial phase focused on selected public health emergency preparedness and response intervention areas, including surge capacity, crisis decision-making, and workforce retention. The search was supplemented with additional sources, including prior reviews, community of practice citation lists, and references from Regional Center workplans.
Articles then moved through a multi-stage screening and review process, including title and abstract screening, full-text review, content expert review, and final adjudication. For articles that were included, the team abstracted structured data using a standardized data dictionary. These data points help characterize the literature and support user navigation of the evidence base.
EvidenceLink is an evolving resource. As the evidence base grows, PRI will continue refining the database, expanding the scope of included articles, and improving how users search, filter, and apply the information. The platform was built using open-source technologies, including WordPress, SQL, and PHP.
EvidenceLink Chat: Making Evidence Easier to Query
PRI also developed EvidenceLink Chat, a retrieval-augmented chatbot that allows users to ask plain-language questions and receive answers based only on the curated EvidenceLink database. EvidenceLink Chat is designed to summarize relevant findings, organize them into themes, and return specific citations from included studies. Users can apply conservative settings to minimize hallucinations and clearly tie each answer back to the underlying evidence. The tool is currently in beta, and PRI is inviting user feedback.
This AI layer was designed to address a common problem with general-purpose chatbots: they can produce inaccurate answers, confabulate findings, or generate incorrect citations. EvidenceLink Chat instead uses retrieval-augmented generation, drawing from PRI’s curated corpus of evidence and linking answers back to the sources in the database. The goal is not to replace expert judgment. Rather, EvidenceLink Chat is intended to help practitioners and researchers ask better questions, identify relevant evidence more quickly, and understand what the literature says in a more accessible format.
Designed for Practical Use
EvidenceLink was built with public health practitioners in mind. The resource includes filters that reflect the ways users may approach preparedness work, including target population, intervention level, disaster type, study type, study design, study outcomes, and intervention area. Intervention areas include community resilience, incident management, information management, surge management, countermeasures and mitigation, and biosurveillance. This structure allows users to move beyond a simple keyword search. A practitioner looking for examples of surge management interventions, workforce preparedness strategies, or community resilience programs can narrow results quickly and review summaries written in practical language.
EvidenceLink also supports future development of “blueprints” for selected evidence-based interventions. These blueprints are intended to provide accessible overviews of interventions, including outcomes, implementation guidance, implementation considerations, and helpful resources cited in the original studies.
Acknowledgments
PRI thanks the many people and partners who contributed to the development of EvidenceLink and EvidenceLink Chat, including Merlin Chowkwanyun, Bashar Makhay, Neena Philip, Rachael Piltch-Loeb, Joey Platt, Eugenie Poirot, Suzue Saito, and Mitch Stripling. PRI also thanks the Evidence Workgroup, CDC partners, Regional Centers for Public Health Preparedness and Response, subject matter experts, researchers, practitioners, and the PRI, ICAP, Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, and CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy teams who supported the design, review, technology development, and implementation of this resource.
Their contributions helped shape EvidenceLink into a practical tool designed to make public health emergency preparedness and response evidence easier to find, understand, and use.
Looking Ahead
EvidenceLink is still growing. PRI will continue expanding the scope of included articles, piloting the resource with practitioners, and creating opportunities for users to critique, suggest, and improve the tool.
The long-term vision is to make EvidenceLink a practical bridge between research and action: a resource that helps public health professionals understand what is known, identify what remains uncertain, and apply evidence in ways that strengthen preparedness and recovery.
By making public health emergency preparedness and response evidence more searchable, understandable, and usable, EvidenceLink supports PRI’s broader mission to develop and support collaborative solutions to public health emergencies that impact New York City and communities beyond.