Enhancing patient outcomes globally by providing answers to clinical questions: Developing pharmacy information services and publishing tools and resources

2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (6) ◽  
pp. 276-278
Author(s):  
Katie A. Carls

With the rapid growth of medication information and increased demands on healthcare practitioners, efficiently finding answers to clinical questions is of great importance. Working for a medical information services and publishing company is a unique pharmacy practice setting that aims to help improve global healthcare outcomes by efficiently delivering answers to clinical questions during a healthcare practitioner's normal work-flow. This practice setting is well-suited for pharmacists with strong interests in medical writing, research, evidence-based medicine, and informatics.

2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 356-359 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald G. Klepser ◽  
Michael E. Klepser ◽  
Jaclyn K. Smith ◽  
Allison M. Dering-Anderson ◽  
Maggie Nelson ◽  
...  

2011 ◽  
pp. 404-413
Author(s):  
Jane Moon

There has been an explosion in the number of different types of portals in the last decade, and at the same time there has been a lot of confusion with them, especially in relation to the enormous number of portals and their differences from Web sites or Web-pages. This coincides with increased use by consumers seeking medical information on the Internet, and with the important role played by medical portals for evidence based medicine. This article explores current portal technology available from an evaluation of market leaders in the industry and identifies important functional components that are necessary in building an intelligent portal to assist users seeking information on the Internet. The emphasis will be on government to consumer portals (G2C) and uses two reputable government portals Betterhealth and Healthinsite as examples to discuss issues involved with those.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 238212052095969
Author(s):  
Diana Kantarovich ◽  
Hanna B Vollbrecht ◽  
Sebastian A Cruz ◽  
Hector Castillo ◽  
Cody S Lee ◽  
...  

Objective: Wikipedia is commonly used to acquire information about various medical conditions such as chronic pain. Ideally, better online pain management content could reduce the burden of opioid use disorders. Our goal was to improve the quality of the content available on Wikipedia to make it more accurate and applicable to medical students and the general public while training medical students to practice evidence-based medicine and critically assess their sources of information. Methods: An elective class in Neuroscience, Pain, and Opioids composed of 10 medical students met biweekly to discuss landmark and practice-changing research articles in the fields of acute pain, chronic pain, and opioid management. The professor chose Wikipedia articles relevant to this course. Three independent viewers analyzed the quality of citations, anecdotal medical content, and content value for both patients and medical professionals. As part of their coursework, students then edited the Wikipedia articles. Results: Although some of the Wikipedia pain topic content (6.7% ± 2.0) was anecdotal, financially biased, or inconsistent with Western Medical Practice content, overall articles included primarily high-quality citations (85.6% ± 3.1). On a 0-5 Likert scale, students felt content would be moderately helpful for both medical students/professionals (3.4 ± 0.2) and laypersons (3.5 ± 0.2). Editing and adding citations was feasible, but novel material was often reverted. Conclusion: A significant amount of pain medicine content was relevant and amenable to student editing. Therefore, future use of this tactic could provide a unique opportunity to integrate evidence-based medicine into the medical curriculum and have a direct impact on the widely available medical information. Future refinement in the editorial process may also further improve online information.


1962 ◽  
Vol 01 (01) ◽  
pp. 16-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. A. Southern

A report is given on the mechanized information retrieval system in operation in the Abbott Laboratories’ Science Information Services which is used for the biomedical periodical literature;i Q’ The system uses a random 12-digit number coding system and an IBM Electronic Statistical Machine 101. The following subjects are discussed in detail: the dictionary; abstracting, coding, and machine searching procedure; uses of the Abbott Abstracts; limitations of the system, and future plans for an improved system.


Author(s):  
Septi Anggraini ◽  
Wahyu Utami ◽  
Elida Zairina

Abstract Background Pharmacists are known as health care professionals who are responsible for the safety and efficacy of medicine to achieve optimal therapeutic results. Community pharmacists have an opportunity to provide direct services including giving an active medication information service in women during pregnancy and breastfeeding. This study aimed to determine the factors associated with the practice of community pharmacists for actively giving the drug information service for women with chronic diseases during pregnancy and breastfeeding based on the Health Belief Model. Methods About 300 community pharmacists were randomly chosen to participate in the study. All participants were asked to complete questionnaires that were designed based on the theory of the Health Belief Models. The questionnaires measured the community pharmacists’ knowledge, beliefs, cues to action, and practice for actively giving medication information services. Results About 267 pharmacists in the community agreed to participate in this study. Nearly 80% of the participants were female pharmacists (n = 213). The results show that pharmacists’ knowledge had significant influences towards perceived threat (p = 0.009), perceived benefit (p = 0.011), and pharmacists’ self-efficacy (p < 0.001). The self-efficacy factor was the most influential factor in the practice of pharmacists to give medication information service actively (p < 0.001). Conclusions The findings of the study indicate that self-efficacy is the most important factor for pharmacist to be able to provide the medication information services successfully particularly in women during pregnancy and breastfeeding. Providing continuous learning programs through seminars and training related to medication use during pregnancy and breastfeeding to pharmacists is needed to optimise the confidence and the ability of pharmacists in providing the services.


2007 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dina Demner-Fushman ◽  
Jimmy Lin

The combination of recent developments in question-answering research and the availability of unparalleled resources developed specifically for automatic semantic processing of text in the medical domain provides a unique opportunity to explore complex question answering in the domain of clinical medicine. This article presents a system designed to satisfy the information needs of physicians practicing evidence-based medicine. We have developed a series of knowledge extractors, which employ a combination of knowledge-based and statistical techniques, for automatically identifying clinically relevant aspects of MEDLINE abstracts. These extracted elements serve as the input to an algorithm that scores the relevance of citations with respect to structured representations of information needs, in accordance with the principles of evidence-based medicine. Starting with an initial list of citations retrieved by PubMed, our system can bring relevant abstracts into higher ranking positions, and from these abstracts generate responses that directly answer physicians' questions. We describe three separate evaluations: one focused on the accuracy of the knowledge extractors, one conceptualized as a document reranking task, and finally, an evaluation of answers by two physicians. Experiments on a collection of real-world clinical questions show that our approach significantly outperforms the already competitive PubMed baseline.


Author(s):  
Michael P. Catanzaro

This chapter provides a summary of a landmark historical study in cardiac surgery related to internal mammary artery ligation versus sham sternotomy for angina pectoris. It describes the history of the procedure and a summary of the study including study design and results, and relates the study to a modern-day principle of evidence-based medicine: blinding and sham surgery. Whether or not sham surgery is ethical remains under debate. Proponents for sham surgery agree that it should be used only when a question cannot be answered adequately by other methods. Cobb and his colleagues were among the first to demonstrate the value of sham studies in addressing important clinical questions.


2011 ◽  
Vol 45 (6) ◽  
pp. 811-818 ◽  
Author(s):  
Poonam Bordoloi ◽  
Andrew Gažo ◽  
Krupa Paranjpe ◽  
Michelle Clausen ◽  
Lesley Fierro

2001 ◽  
Vol 178 (S41) ◽  
pp. s191-s194 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Geddes ◽  
Guy Goodwin

BackgroundThe increasing use of the methods of evidence-based medicine to keep up-to-date with the research literature highlights the absence of high-quality evidence in many areas in psychiatry.AimsTo outline current uncertainties in the maintenance treatment of bipolar disorder and to describe some of the decisions involved in designing a large simple trial.MethodWe describe some of the strategies of evidence-based medicine, and how they can be applied in practice, focusing specifically on the area of bipolar disorder.ResultsOne of the key clinical uncertainties in the treatment of bipolar disorder is the place of maintenance drug treatments and their relative efficacy. A large-scale study, the Bipolar Affective Disorder: Lithium Anticonvulsant Evaluation (BALANCE) trial, is proposed to compare the effectiveness of lithium, valproate and the combination of lithium and valproate.ConclusionsProviding reliable answers to key clinical questions in psychiatry will require new approaches to clinical trials. These will need to be far larger than previously appreciated and will therefore need to be collaborative ventures involving front-line clinicians.


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