Question

In need of helping to answer this question for health informatics class. What can you elaborate on this?

Most clinicians are too busy to perform literature searches for the best evidence. How can that be solved? How is that solved in your workplace?

Answer 1

Ans) Evidence based medicine (EBM) is conscious, specific, reasonable use of modern, best evidences in making decisions about treatment of individual patients.

- It is not a medical cook-book with recipes, but its good application brings cost-effective and better health care.

- Its real purpose is that by the use of the best possible evidence doctor chooses for his patient the best possible solution, wanting to provide to him the optimum health care in every aspect.

- It is also used to avoid major mistakes in the course of treatment, and by this raises the quality of provided health care to the patient. In a wider context, it can save the lives of our patients.

- EBM requires new knowledge from the physician, which means knowledge of English language and work on the computer, which provides access to medical databases, the ability to search medical literature and basic skills in the interpretation of epidemiological and statistical results.

- Once the physician masters the search technique and the use of EBM he/she gets mighty “ally “in their daily noble work. Since each physician must, in one way or another, seek valid information, we can say that the proper use of EBM saves doctors time and raises his level as well as the quality of provided medical services, and increases satisfaction of the health professionals.

The EBM-oriented clinicians of tomorrow have three tasks which needs to be solved:

a) To use evidence summaries in clinical practice;

b) To help develop and update selected systematic reviews or evidence-based guidelines in their area of expertise; and

c) To enroll patients in studies of treatment, diagnosis and prognosis on which medical practice is based.