EPOC Taxonomy

"The first EPOC taxonomy of health systems interventions was developed in 2002, and included the following categories: (1) professional interventions; (2) financial interventions; (3) organisational interventions; and (4) regulatory interventions. This taxonomy was extensively revised and updated between 2013 and 2015 to address key gaps and also to bring the EPOC taxonomy into alignment with other taxonomies that were being used to classify health systems interventions in widely used online databases (Lavis 2015). Our starting point was a taxonomy for health systems arrangements developed for the Health Systems Evidence database (http://www.healthsystemsevidence.org) (Lavis 2015). We applied this taxonomy to all of the interventions included in four overviews of systematic reviews of health systems interventions of high relevance to low income countries (Ciapponi 2014; Herrera 2014; Pantoja 2014; Wiysonge 2014). The taxonomy was then revised iteratively to ensure that all of the included reviews were appropriately categorized and that all relevant health system arrangements and implementation strategies were included and organized logically.

We then applied the revised taxonomy to all of the interventions covered by EPOC reviews. Further minor revisions were made to the taxonomy at this stage to ensure appropriate categorisation of interventions and we also refined the definitions of each of the categories and subcategories."