Introduction to Evidence-Based Medicine

Instructor: Ann McKibbon - Professor Emeritus & Past Director, MSc in eHealth, McMaster University

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Description

Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) addresses the quality of the clinical content of our systems. To be truly successful clinically, our systems, especially those that rely on clinical content such as decision support systems, quality assurance data gathering tools, electronic ordering services, and other such systems that help in decision making must be founded on two pillars of excellence. First our electronic systems must function accurately, support the care process successfully, and be continually available and useable by all those involved in care. Second, the clinical content of our systems must be backed up with strong and appropriate evidence from health research. This session gives a short history of EBM (huge Canadian contributions) and talks about where clinical content is important in our systems, and various innovations such as meta-analyses and clinical practice guidelines that are designed to summarize the clinical evidence into a format that can be used by clinicians and our electronic systems.

Objectives

• To learn what is meant by the term EBM
• To be introduced to the history of EBM - especially its roots in Canada
• To learn why EBM (evidence from the health research) is a vital part of our systems, especially those that are designed to support decision making and care processes
• To become aware of such tools as clinical practice guidelines that summarize healthcare knowledge (or evidence) and that are being formatted so that they can be implemented into eHealth applications to aid in decision making, and potential for error prevention