Generated from folio-assistant-core/processes/content/evidence-retrieval.bpmn by gen-processes-viz.ts — do not edit here. All processes

Evidence for a recommendation

Process_EvidenceRetrieval · strict · 10 step(s)

Frame a question for a recommendation, retrieve and appraise evidence from trusted sources, and either attach it or record the gap. The author reviews the guidance already in their content, frames the question as PICO, retrieves candidate evidence across three classes (trusted L1 sources, trusted L2/L3 content, data repositories), verifies each candidate’s authority against the publishing body’s own API, grades the body of evidence, and either attaches it to the recommendation or records the gap. STRAWPERSON: registries, grading system and API bindings are not fixed here.

How it connects

• Called by: Editing and HCI validation
• Calls: none
• Presented on: Evidence for a recommendation — The subprocess

Lanes — who acts

lane	role	what it does here
Author / guideline developer (person)	author	Brackets the machine work rather than doing it: frames the PICO before Lane_Agent fans out across evidence classes, then is the only lane that grades what comes back and decides whether it is sufficient for a recommendation — retrieval and authority-checking are delegated, but the judgement that turns evidence into a claim never leaves this lane.
Evidence agent (system)	evidence-agent	The appraisal in the role’s own description happens elsewhere in this diagram: this lane only fans out in parallel across the three evidence classes and joins the candidates, while grading is Lane_Author’s call and authority is Lane_Trusted’s — so what it owns here is coverage, not judgement.
Trusted registries and observatories (external)	external-registry	Task_VerifyAuthority and its gateway sit here rather than with Lane_Agent because the decision is not this instance’s call — it is a readout of what the external API returns, and the moment that answer is uncertain or absent, Lane_WorkPlan opens a bean rather than this lane inventing a verdict.
Work plan — beans (shared)	work-plan	Catches two different shortfalls at two different severities: an unverified citation is noted but the process continues into grading, while an insufficient body of evidence ends the process at its own event — so only the second is fatal, and both stay visible in the work plan rather than one being silently absorbed into the other.

Steps

Every one of the 10 step(s) is documented.

step	lane	skill / sub-process	what it does
Review the guidance already in this content Task_ReviewExisting	Author / guideline developer (person)	content-review	The author reads what the document, DAK or IG ALREADY says on this question, before looking outward. A recommendation that contradicts a sibling recommendation in the same artefact is a defect no external evidence will reveal.
Frame the question as PICO Task_FramePico	Author / guideline developer (person)	content-author	Population, Intervention, Comparator, Outcome. The PICO is what makes the search reproducible and the evidence auditable: without it, ‘we looked for evidence’ is not a claim anyone can check. WHO guideline development states the question this way before any retrieval.
Search trusted SOURCES — L1 Task_L1Sources	Evidence agent (system)	document-intake	Ingested primary literature under library/: the sections/*.md tree and, where a document was scanned, ocr/page-NNN.txt. NOTE the known blind spot — a document OCR’d but never re-run through pdf-structure.py has only a stub in sections/, so a sections-only search misses it.
Search trusted CONTENT — L2 DAKs, L3 IGs Task_L2L3Content	Evidence agent (system)	document-intake document-intake document-intake	Already-adjudicated guidance: WHO SMART DAKs at L2 and FHIR Implementation Guides at L3. A recommendation adopted in a published DAK is evidence of a different kind from a primary study – it is a prior decision, with its own provenance, and must be cited as that rather than laundered into primary evidence. NOT YET SKILL-BACKED. This step named corpus-search, which has never existed. It is not corpus-grep, whose job is the pre-declaration check that something really is an open gap — searching adjudicated L2/L3 content for evidence is a different task, so pointing the ref there would have been a plausible-looking wrong answer. Left uncovered until the skill is written.
Query data repositories and statistical datasets Task_DataRepos	Evidence agent (system)	document-intake document-intake document-intake	Indicator and microdata sources. Distinct from the two above because the unit of evidence is a MEASUREMENT with a population, a period and a method, not a claim in prose.
Verify authority against the observatory / registry API Task_VerifyAuthority	Trusted registries and observatories (external)	registry-authority-contract	Each candidate is resolved against the standard API of the body that publishes it, so that ‘authoritative’ is a RESOLVED FACT rather than an assertion in the citation. What is checked: that the identifier resolves at the publisher; that the retrieved record matches what the citation claims; that the version and date are the ones cited; and that the publisher is one this folio has declared trusted. STRAWPERSON: the concrete registry list and endpoints are not settled here – see the cat-harness.processes:policy note.
Open a bean for the unverified citation Task_RecordUnverified	Work plan — beans (shared)	todo-manager	An unresolvable citation is not dropped and not silently kept. It becomes a tracked item, so the gap is visible in the work plan rather than surviving as a footnote nobody re-checks.
Appraise and grade the body of evidence Task_AppraiseGrade	Author / guideline developer (person)	evidence-appraisal	Certainty of evidence per the grading system the folio declares. The grade attaches to the BODY of evidence for one PICO question, not to an individual citation – which is why this step is after the join and not inside the fan-out.
Record the evidence gap Task_RecordGap	Work plan — beans (shared)	todo-manager	Insufficient evidence is a RESULT. It is recorded as such – an honest gap the guideline can state – rather than being closed by weakening the recommendation until the available evidence supports it.
Attach the evidence to the recommendation Task_AttachEvidence	Author / guideline developer (person)	content-author	The PICO, the graded body of evidence, each verified citation and its resolved authority record are written onto the recommendation block, so a reader can retrace the whole chain from the sentence back to the source.

Decisions

Every one of the 2 decision(s) is documented.

decision	what decides it	branches
Authority confirmed? Gateway_Authoritative	Answered by checking the source against the observatory or registry API: is its authority confirmed? no opens a bean for the unverified citation; yes goes on to appraise and grade the evidence.	no → Open a bean for the unverified citation yes → Appraise and grade the body of evidence
Sufficient for a recommendation? Gateway_Sufficient	Answered by the appraisal: is the graded evidence enough to support a recommendation? no records the evidence gap; yes attaches the evidence to the recommendation.	no → Record the evidence gap yes → Attach the evidence to the recommendation