Evidence Based Health Care: History of the Section

The NYAM Fellows on Evidence Based Health Care: History of the Section

Following a US National Library of Medicine funded effort from 1998-2000 to establish an evidence based medicine resource center at NYAM, coupled  with a regionally based workshop series, evidence-based practice (EBP) teaching and development efforts at the Academy were taken over by a group of emergency physicians who had been part of the original program.  This group included librarians who had been trained in use of evidence based electronic resources at the Academy.  The emergency medicine group extended the reach of efforts to a national and international scale with a series of annual workshops between 2002 and 2008 that drew emergency practitioners and teachers from across the US and Canada as well as practitioners in other specialties and disciplines.  This series opened up collaboration with a parallel development effort in Brazil and brought the nursing discipline into EBP education efforts at NYAM for the first time, much as the earlier program had introduced librarians.  The emergency medicine collaboration initiated a series of off-site workshops in medical centers within and without the region. It also produced innovative work in the area of educational evaluation and assessment and a uniquely practice-based design of a workshop series.   

With the establishment of the Section on Evidence Based Health Care (SEBHC) in 2009, the multi-disciplinary focus was enhanced further and multiple clinical specialties were engaged. The scope of relevant collaboration expanded to include individuals and organizations engaged in guideline development, implementation science and knowledge translation, and health care policy.  In the same year that it was established, SEBHC was awarded a grant from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) to link capacity building conference designs to knowledge based improvement initiatives within participating health care institutions and networks.  The 3-year pilot project resulted in successful projects within several hospital networks as well as maturation of the design.