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A. Öztürk:
"Evidence-Based Medicine. A State-of-the-Art Report.";
Report for Asgaard-TR-2006-2; 2006; 34 pages.

EBM advocates the use of up-to-date best scientific evidence from health care research as the basis for making medical decisions. Each time a physician sees a patient he/she is expected to provide effective and efficient care.

Therefore, physicians have to know the facts about the disease (e.g., frequencies, signs, symptoms) and how all these facts are affected by the patients characteristics (e.g., age, sex, family history, risk factors, and other disease). The number of facts and the connection between these facts that a physician uses for medical decision-making is extraordinary. A book about a medical specialty that summarizes the most important information is typically more than 2,000 pages long. In addition to this books exists a great number of published biomedical journals and articles. On the strength of this information flood physicians have a hard task to deliver the best health care without any additional support. EBM tries to overcome this problem and support the physicians in their daily work providing evidence-based clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) including all information needed for the decision-making process for an individual patient.

In this paper we will discuss the main properties of EBM and the requirements of evidence-based CPGs.

http://publik.tuwien.ac.at/files/pub-inf_4602.pdf