Institute:Office of National Coordinator (ONC) Workforce Training Curriculum
Component:The Culture of Health Care
Unit:Evidence-Based Practice
Lecture:Definition and application of EBM
Phrasing the clinical question
Slide content:Syntheses Systematic reviews Exhaustive, systematic review of data on a topic Not a simple literature review or overview of papers one knows about Application, where appropriate, of meta-analysis, the combination of results from multiple studies in a single analysis Studies must be appropriately similar, and there are methodological means to assess that Available in PubMed or in specialized Pubmed Health http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth 11
Slide notes:11 The syntheses [ sin - thuh - seez ] , level typically consists of systematic reviews or sometimes evidence reports. These are exhaustive reviews of the data on a given topic. Where appropriate, meta-analysis is applied by combining the results of multiple, similar studies into a single analysis. The combined studies have to be appropriately similar for meta-analysis to be valid, and methodologic means can be used to assess whether studies are similar enough. For example, if there have been fifteen different clinical trials looking at surgery or medical treatment for back pain or a specific type of cancer, and they have similar interventions as well as similar patient groups, then we can combine them in a meta-analysis. Meta-analysis can be done not only for treatments but also for diagnostic tests, prognoses, and so forth. Systematic reviews are available in PubMed and in the specialized PubMed Health database, which is limited to systematic reviews.