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The two most commonly cited definitions of Evidence-based Medicine are:
"A NEW paradigm for medical practice is emerging. evidence-based medicine de-emphasizes intuition, unsystematic clinical experience and pathophysiologic rationale as sufficient grounds for clinical decision making and stresses the examination of evidence from clinical research. Evidence based medicine requires new skills of the physician, including efficient literature searching and the application of formal rules of evidence evaluating the clinical literature." JAMA 1992;268:2420-5
"Evidence-based medicine is the conscientious, explicit and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients. The practice of evidence-based medicine means integrating individual clinical expertise with the best available external clinical evidence from systematic research." BMJ 1996; 312: 71-2
It is clear from these two definitions that EBM is a tool that was developed to help medical practitioners insure that their patients receive the best possible care. But what about administrators, program managers and policy makers? Are there any evidence-based tools that they can use to make sure that the decisions they make are also in the patients best interest?
We define Evidence-based Decision Making as:
"The consideration of the evidence when making health care decisions at the level of the process, structure, program or system."
Therefore the primary purpose of this site is to support health care decision making by;
We hope you enjoy our site, and if you have any feedback, please don't hesitate to contact us.
Sincerely,