Doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals need to keep up-to-date if they are to provide optimal care to patients. However the published medical literature doubles every two months, making this a considerable challenge. Billions are spent generating, collecting, systematically reviewing and curating research findings but there is a large gap between what we know works or does not work and what happens in practice. There are lots of reasons for this large “implementation gap”. BestEvidence sets out to overcome some of the barriers to getting research evidence into practice.
The BestEvidence app puts the best available evidence at the fingertips of clinicians through an intuitive interface which searches millions of indexed, continually updated, and quality ranked articles, and presents them in order of relevance. It enables users to track and manage their activity and knowledge and share this with colleagues.
The following are examples of where using evidence or failing to use evidence has had an important affect on patient outcomes.
BestEvidence is convinced that the barriers to using best evidence cannot be ignored. Our services are designed to overcome or significantly minimise any barriers. We will allow all professionals to have easy access to research that has been professionally reviewed and is considered highly important and most importantly relevant to their immediate needs. Additional added value services address typical needs of professionals and the organisations they relate to. There are 3 fundamental app services and a fourth training and consultancy service. These are:
A free access basic app, including a note functionality, digital critical appraisal checklists and push notifications. The BestEvidence app. several orders of magnitude more content than competitors.
A chargeable premium app which has additional services such artificial intelligence to help users ask the most appropriate questions, critical appraisal checklists and Continuous Professional Reports (CPDs) on the number of hours spent checking research and doing critical appraisals.
Customised apps suitable for organisations such as hospital trusts and Royal Colleges that need to ‘push out’ information, have ready access to documents and their own medical learning reviews and have real-time data analytics of usage, hot topics etc.. For example to disseminate evidence or support their staff in undertaking ‘Evidence Based Practice (EBP)’, provide a “Critical Appraisals Library (CAT Bank)” that will be quality assured, pre-appraised evidence summaries (like Best Bets) and a large anonymised database about people’s uncertainties and how they search for and use information in their specialty, which can be analysed to generate new knowledge about health information behaviours.
We also offer a sub-cohort of users, the BestEvidence champions, trained in EBP and who can be used as a resource in the future. This can include training and consultancy advice. Publications in reports, peer-reviewed journals and blogs.