Finding the best available evidence: what's new?
The voluminous growth of the health literature paired with time constraints of practitioners can make it difficult to implement evidence-based medicine (EBM). New and better resources that summarize and/or synthesize the literature are available to facilitate the integration of evidence into practice. Understanding how such resources work and how to use them is an important step in finding evidence for patient care. By using a clinical scenario concerning abdominal aortic aneurysm screening, this article describes 3 types of EBM resources from the "4S" model: systems, synopses, and syntheses. The common features of each resource type are discussed and comparisons of selected examples are provided.
Hooper-Lane
Christopher
C
Ebling Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI 53705-2221, USA. chooper@library.wisc.edu
Combs
Ann M
AM
Feldstein
David
D
D019317:Evidence-Based Medicine; D006801:Humans; D007255:Information Services; D020407:Internet; D016239:MEDLINE