The aim of this project is to increase physicians' use of Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) by integrating three critical components into a single information system: NLM's PubMed database, EBM-trained clinical librarians, and web-based consult service software. The information system is designed to provide full text evidence-based literature with critical appraisal in response to a clinical question by a remote physician. During the project period, the service will be developed, provided to two clinical departments at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a group of community practitioners in Peoria, Illinois, and evaluated using multiple methods. The project will benefit the participating departments directly by providing them with an information service that meets their need for timely evidence searches with appraisal of results. It will benefit the UI Library of the Health Sciences by developing local expertise and training materials that can be used in the future. The project has the following specific objectives: 1. To fully develop an EBM web-based consult service application. On the basis of prototype work, we have identified several important areas of improvement. 2. To train health science librarians to staff the service, and to produce a training manual so that training procedures can be replicated at other sites. 3. To train physicians to use the service, and to produce online training and context-sensitive help. 4. To evaluate the service on three criteria: (a) Feasibility, by documentation of the implementation process. and resource requirements for operation; (b) Usefulness, by documentation of frequency of use, user attitudes toward the service and ratings of the value of information returned, and an evaluation study comparing articles located by the service staff to articles located by physicians; and (c) Longitudinal educational and attitudinal impact on staff and users on relevant EBM skills and attitudes. 5. To demonstrate and evaluate the feasibility of technology transfer, by implementing and evaluating a second instance of the service at a second site (UI Peoria) staffed by librarians at that site and targeted to rural community physicians.
| Schwartz, Alan; Millam, Gregory; UIC LCS Investigators (2006) A web-based library consult service for evidence-based medicine: Technical development. BMC Med Inform Decis Mak 6:16 |
