World Evidence-based Healthcare Day launches its 2026 campaign

Today an international coalition of organizations dedicated to evidence-informed decision-making launched the World Evidence-based Healthcare (EBHC) Day 2026 campaign, ‘Evidence and AI: People at the Centre’. About World EBHC Day World EBHC Day is delivered in partnership by JBI, Cochrane, The Campbell Collaboration, Institute of Development Studies (IDS), Centre for Evidence-based Health Care, and Instituto Veredas. World EBHC Day partners are GIN, HTiA, and The Africa Evidence Youth League. Held annually on 20 October, World EBHC Day raises awareness of the need for better evidence to inform healthcare policy, practice, and decision-making in order to improve health outcomes globally. The 2026 campaign From automated evidence syntheses and clinical decision-support tools to multilingual translation and AI-generated health content, AI is rapidly changing the way evidence moves through healthcare systems. The 2026 campaign explores the rapidly growing role of artificial intelligence (AI) in evidence-based healthcare and examines how people can remain at the centre of how AI is developed, deployed, governed, evaluated, and used in healthcare systems and evidence ecosystems. At the same time, the 2026 campaign acknowledges significant challenges associated with AI, including algorithmic bias, misinformation, opaque decision-making, inequitable access, and the potential erosion of public trust. “Artificial intelligence is already transforming healthcare and the evidence ecosystem,” said Bianca Pilla, Chair of the World EBHC Day Steering Committee. “AI has enormous potential to make evidence more timely, accessible, and responsive, but these technologies must be guided by transparency, accountability, equity, and meaningful human involvement.” The World EBHC Day 2026 campaign focuses on four pillars: - Communities, patients, and the public as partners in AI-enabled EBHC - Ethics, integrity, and governance of AI in EBHC - Innovation, automation, and the transformation of evidence ecosystems - Communicating trustworthy evidence in the age of AI Get involved World EBHC Day 2026 invites researchers, clinicians, communicators, policymakers, technologists, patients, communities, and the public to contribute to global discussion by submitting blogs, videos or podcasts, or by hosting events.