Information Technology for Evidence Based Medicine: Status and Future Direction

Evidence based medicine (EBM) refers to the conscientious, explicit, and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients. This article presents systematic review of the use of information technology (IT) to support EBM with a particular emphasis on status and opportunities. Out of 2,490 papers initially scanned, 585 articles were included at the title level review. This was followed by an abstract review, which resulted in 196 articles. On full text scanning of the 196 articles, 69 articles met the inclusion criteria and were included in the final analyses. The key issues and potential for IT support for the practice of EBM are insufficient techniques to produce evidence in a computer interpretable format, insufficient research to combine the evidence from the multiple sources, inadequate techniques that automatically rate the literature and practice-based evidence, and integration of evidence at the clinician’s workflow.