The Kellogg Library’s subscription to BMJ PointofCare will end on December 31, 2011. In its place we offer the North American edition of this product called Best Practice. Also produced by the BMJ Publishing Group, Best Practice offers evidence-based information on diagnosis, prognosis, treatment and prevention for use at the point of care.
Best Practice can be found on the Libraries’ website, or you can connect to Best Practice now!
High quality information on health interventions is now freely available to all Canadians through the Cochrane Library for a trial period of nine months ending December 2009. This pilot project is a joint initiative of the Canadian Cochrane Network and Centre and the Canadian Health Libraries Association / Association des bibliothèques de la santé du Canada (CHLA/ABSC). This project has been built on local library initiatives across Canada that made the Cochrane Library available to universities, health authorities and other organizations.
Locally, the Cochrane Library has been available to all the citizens of of Nova Scotia (through the Atlantic Health Knowledge Partnership) and New Brunswick. Nationally, Saskatchewan, NWT, Nunavat and Yukon also have had access for all citizens. To achieve this national license, the total expenditure for Canada had to be “topped up” by only 10%, illustrating remarkable cost effectiveness through partnering.
The systematic reviews in the Cochrane Library are considered to be the best quality evidence for what works and what doesn’t in many health care interventions/treatments. Now any Canadian connected to the Internet can access these reviews and other types of health care information. Cochrane reviews, while written for health care professionals, include easy to read summaries written for the lay person. As always, however, one should never use health information without first consulting with your physician.
To access the best online resource on health treatments, go to www.thecochranelibrary.com
Read the press release from the Canadian Cochrane Network and Centre. Listen here for our podcast announcement by the Director of the Canadian Cochrane Network and Centre, Dr Jeremy Grimshaw.
For assistance in using the Cochrane Library visit your local Health Sciences Library. For more information on this project, visit the Canadian Health Libraries Association website.
The Texas Health Science Libraries Consortium conducted a Systematic Evaluation of Evidence Based Medicine Tools for Point-of-Care.
It rates 10 top EBM tools in several different categories. ACP’s PIER comes out as number one in all categories, with Cochrane Library and Clinical Evidence holding down the number two and three spots.
View the whole PowerPoint presentation by going to STATRef on the Kellogg Library’s website and clicking on the link for “Systematic Evaluation for Evidence-Based Medicine Tools for Point-of-Care”.
InfoRetriever/InfoPOEMS – trial ends Aug. 25, 2007
InfoPOEMs® highlight the progression of clinically-applicable evidence, one study at a time. InfoRetriever® uniquely enables rapid point-of-care access to the best available filtered, graded, synopsized evidence and evidence-derived tools.
InfoRetriever®, by presenting the best evidence and not just expert opinion, provides clinicians the information needed to make the best clinical decisions. By focusing on “Patient-Oriented Evidence that Matters” (POEMs), it avoids the wrong decisions too often associated with expert opinion in recent years. For example – doxazosin for hypertension, vitamin E for heart disease, beta-carotene to prevent cancer, arthroscopic surgery for osteoarthritis of the knee, hormone replacement therapy to prevent heart disease, patching corneal abrasions, using encainide for post-infarction arrhythmias, and sleeping infants on their sides or stomach
– were all recommended by experts yet all worsened patient outcomes.
InfoPOEMs® are synopses of new evidence, relevant to patient care, from a continuous review, grading, and critical appraisal of 1200+ studies published monthly in 100 journals. Each study is filtered for relevance and then for validity, using criteria from the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine (Oxford). About 1 in 40 studies qualify as an InfoPOEM, and 20-30 InfoPOEMs are identified
monthly.
Take a tour of InfoRetriever at http://www.infopoems.com/product/tour.cfm
Please send your comments to Patrick Ellis