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- DictionaryEvidence-based medicine
noun
- 1. medical practice or care that emphasizes the practical application of the findings of the best available current research: "endorsement of unproven treatments makes a mockery of evidence-based medicine"
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Evidence-based medicine (EBM) is "the conscientious, explicit and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients. ... [It] means integrating individual clinical expertise with the best available external clinical evidence from systematic research."
Searches related to evidence-based medicine definition
evidence-based nursing evidence-based practice Sep 8, 2016 · Evidence-based medicine (EBM) seeks reliable answers that can help you find the treatment that is right for you. It is based on scientific proof, and not just theories or expert opinions. If you're ill, you'll usually want to get better as soon as possible.
- 2016/09/08
Apr 30, 2024 · The term evidence-based medicine (EBM) refers to the practice of caring for patients using the best available research evidence to guide clinical decision-making (figure 1) [1,2].
Oct 24, 2022 · Evidence-based medicine provides a roadmap for clinicians to apply valid scientific evidence to the patient's condition based on the patient's values, using the clinician's clinical judgment to tailor the treatment for the patient.
- Steven Tenny, Matthew Varacallo
- 2022/10/24
- 2020
- Overview
- The five essential steps
- Best evidence
- Technical problems
- Political critiques
- Practical challenges
evidence-based medicine, approach to patient care in which decisions about the diagnosis and management of the individual patient are made by a clinician, using personal experience and expertise combined with the best, most relevant, and most up-to-date scientific information available.
Evidence-based medicine developed in the 1990s primarily out of a need to assess the reliability of a growing body of current research information and to apply new procedures and products. Although the initial impetus came from academic medicine, the idea appealed especially to funding agencies, given the prospect of the development of services that were particularly appropriate and cost-effective for the population served. As a result, evidence-based medicine received the necessary financial, managerial, and ideological support to sustain its development.
The practice of evidence-based medicine emphasizes five essential steps. First, the clinician identifies a clear clinical question that arises out of the management of an individual patient; the question leads to a need for information. In the second step, the best source of evidence available to address the need is identified. Third, the evidence ...
Central to evidence-based medicine is the use of the best possible evidence in diagnostic and treatment decisions, where best is defined by a hierarchy of quality-of-study designs providing evidence. The most-reliable evidence is generated by systematic reviews of randomized controlled trials (RCTs), which minimize bias and allow for causal interpr...
Evidence-based medicine has drawn attention to important issues in medicine, some of which have hindered its acceptance. For example, some important questions in health care may never be resolved by RCTs for practical reasons. That may occur when adverse events are so infrequent that trials would require impossibly large sample sizes or when health outcomes lie so far in the future that maintaining a trial would be impractical. In the field of critical care, RCTs are embedded within ethical concerns. In the past there was debate about whether RCTs should be the gold standard in proving an evidence base for practice. Another important technical problem is the relevance of results from clinical trials and systematic reviews to decisions about individual patients. The research evidence is usually about the average effect of an intervention across all types of patients. The extent to which that average effect is applicable to individual patients, however, may be unclear.
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A second challenge facing the development of evidence-based medicine stemmed from political critiques. One powerful analysis argued that evidence-based medicine represents a fundamental and undesirable erosion of professional autonomy of health professionals, especially physicians. Some observers argued that the reduction of clinical decisions to e...
A third issue surrounding evidence-based medicine was whether it was an approach to medicine that was feasible to implement in practice. In the early 2000s studies in countries worldwide, including Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, suggested that only a minority of clinicians used evidence-based information resources such as the Cochrane Library, the primary database of systematic reviews. One survey found that only 4 percent of a sample of U.K. general practitioners had ever used the Cochrane Library to help in clinical decisions. Studies identified a range of reasons for the relative lack of uptake. Many clinicians, for example, were unaware of what constituted high-quality forms of evidence and continued to rely on traditional reviews and textbooks. Clinicians were sometimes unaware of how to access systematic reviews. Because of heavy workloads, many simply did not have the time to address evidence-based approaches.
By the second decade of the 21st century, however, evidence-based medicine had entered into a mature phase, where the complexities of what constituted good evidence were accepted and the difficulties of applying evidence to individual practice were acknowledged and addressed. Constant advances in information technology encouraged optimism that increasing numbers of feasible applications of evidence-based medicine would emerge.
- Ray Fitzpatrick
Jul 1, 2014 · Evidence-based practice is the integration of scientific evidence, patients' values, and one's own clinical judgment in order to make the best possible health care decision.
The variations in strategies and among different countries, regions, and practices has led to a call for a more systematic approach to identifying the most appropriate strategy for an individual patient using an established hierarchy of evidence; this approach is called evidence-based medicine (EBM).
