Start with both cinahl and medlinepubmed as initial article databases for a scoping search for most health sciences questions. Picot and clinical questions evidence based nursing practice. Pico is an acronym to help researchers create focused, clinical questions. Background questions are best answered by medical textbooks, pointofcare tools such as dynamed plus and essential evidence plus, and. Pico is an acronym to help you remember the components of a clinical research question. Pico evidencebased practice libguides at duke university. They cover the same 4 content areas as background questions diagnosis, treatment, etiology, and prognosis and are the only types of questions we deal with in evidencebased medicine. A book or an ebook on medical ethics and legal issues. Pico element detection in medical text without metadata. Pico evidence based medicine subject and course guides. Various models and decisionmaking aids exist for chiropractic clinical practice.
Fortunately, the evolution of evidencebased medicine has provided systematic tools to simplify the formulation of interrogatives that serve as the foundation of a real clinical research question. The pico process or framework is a mnemonic used in evidence based practice to frame and answer a clinical or health care related question. Often these questions can best be answered by using a textbook or consulting a clinical. The ebm process begins when a clinician you is presented with a scenario that has some uncertain end or unanswered question. Pico method evidence based practice library guides at. Clinical questions and the pico method evidencebased practice.
Your question should identify the key problem of the patient, what treatment or intervention you are considering for the patient, any alternative treatments or interventions, the outcome you want to avoid or promote. Evidencebased models use a process for framing a question, locating, assessing, evaluating, and. The first stage of any evidencebased practice process is formulating an answerable question. The pico process or framework is a mnemonic used in evidence based practice and specifically evidence based medicine to frame and answer a clinical or health care related question. Pico alternately known as picot is a mnemonic used to describe. The pico process is a technique used in evidencebased practice to frame and answer a clinical question in terms of the specific patients problem that helps clinically relevant for evidence in.
A wellformulated question will facilitate the search for evidence and will assist you in determining whether the evidence is relevant to your question. Find articles find books mobile medical resources research by. One of the fundamentals in the evidencebased medicine toolkit is known by the acronym pico. They require a specific named intervention and comparison, which makes them good questions for medline and the research literature. Finding the best evidence evidencebased healthcare. Evidence based medicine this guide is designed to assist health care professionals and students become effective and efficient users of the medical literature. If your topic has a behavioralmental health component, also try psycinfo. Pico evidence based medicine subject and course guides at. You will find that while many of the cases that you face as a clinician are routine and have a known trajectory, some cases have an air of ambiguity to them.