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:Synopses and Systems SynopsesHighly summarized information appropriate for clinical setting, such as Critically appraised topics (CATs) Clinical Evidence, InfoPOEMS , PIER Clinical practice guidelines SystemsDecision support within electronic health record systems Best way to provide evidence to clinicians at point of clinical decision making 12
Slide notes:12 Synopses, then, are summaries of information that is pertinent to the clinical setting. Synopses provide answers to specific questions. If a clinician in a busy clinical environment has a patient with low back pain, he or she wants to know what the evidence shows for available treatments. The clinician doesnt necessarily want to know all of the many different studies that have been done or how those studies have been combined. Nor, when many studies have been conducted for a specific topic, does the clinician necessarily want the details of one individual study, because it would be inappropriate and less helpful to focus on only one. Synopses are often written as critically appraised topics, or CATs [ katz ] as they are sometimes called. They are available in publications such as the book Clinical Evidence . Other resources are online, such as InfoPOEMs (Patient-Oriented Evidence that Matters) and PIER [peer], which we will talk about when we discuss synopses in more detail. Clinical practice guidelines also fall into this synopses category. The highest level in the hierarchy, systems, refers to decision support systems accessible through electronic health record systems. Clinical decision support systems are designed to facilitate the decision-making process at the point of care. These systems are most effective when clinicians access evidence-based information when they are making clinical decisions. This is the highest level -- knowing the context of patient care and providing the evidence to the clinician to use in providing clinical care.