Welcome

About the EBM Resource Center Web Page

The Web Page contains references, bibliographies, tutorials, glossaries, and on-line databases to guide those embarking on teaching and practicing evidence-based medicine. It offers practice tools to support critical analysis of the literature and MEDLINE searching, as well as links to other sites that help enable evidence-based medical care.

Using the EBM Resource Center Web Page

This site is divided into a number of components designed to support:

  1. finding the best evidence
  2. critical appraisal of the studies obtained
  3. easy access to aids needed for finding and appraising the evidence
    (including links to the User's Guides, EBM toolkits, worksheets and calculators)
  4. Teaching of EBM (including links to online tutorials, slides and presentations)

Why Evidence-based Medicine?

EBM's ultimate application is at the level of the individual clinician's decisions about managing patients.  It is an explicit approach to problem solving and continual professional learning which requires the use of current best evidence in making medical decisions about individual patients.  To achieve evidence-informed decisions, the health practitioner should:

  • Develop a focused clinical question concerning the patient's problem(s)
  • Search secondary databases and the primary literature for relevant articles
  • Access the validity and usefulness of those articles
  • Judge the relevance to the individual patient
  • Implement the findings in patient care

Familiarity with the precepts and tools available for practicing evidence-based medical care makes it possible to bring an enormous literature under control, and, as databases improve, to answer clinical questions at the point of care in real time.

Searching Evidence-based Medicine

The New York Academy of Medicine

 Library
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New York, NY 10029-5293