Scientific evidence is a crucial underpinning of clinical practice. Nevertheless, the first series of articles aimed at providing clinicians with guidelines for critically appraising the evidence that informs clinical practices did not appear until 1981.1 Ten years later, the term “evidence-based medicine”2 first appeared in the medical literature. Subsequently, between 1993 and 2000, a group o...

Cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) offers decision makers a structured, rational approach with which to improve the return on resources expended. But decades after its widespread promotion to the medical community, policy makers in the United States remain reluctant to use the approach formally. Indeed, the resistance to economic evidence in the United States in an era of evidence-based medicine...

Modern clinical practice relies on evidence-based medicine (EBM) and evidence-based guidelines (EBGs). The critical evaluation of EBGs value is therefore an essential step to further improve clinical practice. In our opinion, correlating levels of evidence and grades of recommendation can be an easy tool to quickly display internal consistence of EBGs.

A major challenge in the evidence-based design (EBD) practice model has been in determining the degree of credibility of specific (or a body of) evidence. This challenge has remained one of the key impediments to the broader adoption of EBD. Borrowing from evidence-based medicine and evidence-based practice literatures, this paper proposes a framework for evaluating evidence in EBD. Key to the ...

BACKGROUND Two of the key steps in evidence based medicine (EBM) are being able to construct a clinical question and effectively search the literature to source relevant information. No evidence currently exists that informs whether such skills should be taught to medical students during their pre-clinical years, or delivered to include both the pre-clinical and clinical years of study. This is...