Wiley-Blackwell is offering Essential Evidence, an information resource for medical professionals. I'm impressed by how much effort went into this. They've filtered massive amounts of medical research.
Here's how the publishers describe it: "Essential Evidence is a powerful, one-stop, state-of-the-art reference that includes best-evidence answers to your most important clinical questions concerning symptoms, diseases, and treatment. Its concise, highly structured content is tightly integrated and hyperlinked to thousands of calculators, articles, and evidence summaries within
Essential Evidence Plus to make searching for answers quick and seamless. Each topic has a 'strength of evidence' rating for every recommendation, a 'Bottom-line' summary that introduces each section, and a broad array of helpful algorithms."
According to the press release [pdf], "Essential Evidence is available... through the web or via handheld computer (Pocket PC or Palm® OS). The product features approximately 700 structured medical topics at launch with approximately 100 more in development." Topics are integrated and linked to other content such as Cochrane reviews, literature summaries, decision support tools, evidence-based guidelines, and interactive diagnostic test calculators.
Highlights: The content is well-organized and highly structured.
- A "Bottom Line" feature highlights the most important information in each section.
- Writeups include lists of risk factors with odds ratios (e.g., the likelihood a first-degree relative will have a particular condition).
- Evidence is rated by strength (more about that below).
- Daily POEMs ("Patient-Oriented Evidence that Matters").
- Distinguishing between patient-oriented and disease-oriented evidence.
Lowlights: No iPhone, Blackberry, or Droid support. On Twitter, @andrewspong lamented "Essential Evidence is a point of care product! Who still *has* a Pocket PC or Palm PDA? Such a missed opportunity. I just can't believe Wiley-Blackwell launched Essential Evidence without iPhone/Android/BB support." I agree, this is a big fail, considering how much work has gone into the product.
The Essential Evidence service is really a collection of tools.
Evidence as Poetry: Patient-Oriented Evidence that Matters. Each POEM focuses on a single clinical question. They provide a brief writeup of the evidence, include a 'printer-friendly' button, and a quick link to related information in PubMed (or possibly elsewhere). Example here:
Strength of Evidence. Much of the evidence provided is marked to indicate the likelihood that a particular treatment will be successful. One of the schemes they use is the Strength-of-Recommendation Taxonomy (SORT). Evidence is tagged with "Sort A", "Sort B" etc. as shown here.
More about SORT. 'Patient-oriented evidence' measures outcomes that matter to patients (things like mortality, symptom improvement, costs, quality of life), whereas 'disease-oriented evidence' measures end points that may or may not reflect improvements in patient outcomes (e.g. blood pressure, physiologic function, pathologic findings). The taxonomy works as follows: SORT A = Consistent, good-quality patient-oriented evidence; B = Inconsistent or limited-quality patient-oriented evidence; and C = Consensus, disease-oriented evidence, usual practice, expert opinion, or case series for studies of diagnosis, treatment, prevention, or screening.
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