Student Report - EBM Exercise

The first step in this exercise is to select a case that you would like to present during Student Report.  If you are unsure which case would be appropriate, please direct questions to your session facilitator or Dr. Emily Graham.

After selecting a case, you will then need to develop a question about this case.  Typically, questions will fall into one of four main categories:

• Therapy: comparing treatments or interventions
• Diagnosis: comparing different diagnostic tests or measures
• Prognosis: determining how a disease or condition may progress
• Etiology/Harm: determining if an intervention or exposure may cause harm

Journal articles make up a large part of the literature of medicine, and we typically turn to the journal literature when looking to answer a clinical foreground question. Foreground questions are more specific than background questions and are typically focused on a specific patient or population.  A good clinical question is specific, searchable, and answerable. The acronym PICO is often used as a framework for asking clinical questions.

P = patient, problem, population

I  = intervention

C = comparison intervention

O = outcomes

This brief video from the company Clinical Information Sciences provides a nice overview of the PICO framework.