LibraryGuides: Evidence-Based Practice: Asking the Clinical Question

Getting Started

Patients or Population: Who are the relevant patients?
Intervention(s) or Exposure(s): For example, diagnostic tests, foods, drugs, surgical procedures, time, or risk factors. What are the management strategies we are interested in comparing or the potentially harmful exposures about which we are concerned?
Comparator: For issues of therapy, prevention, or harm, there will always be both an experimental intervention or putative harmful exposure and a control, alternative, or comparison intervention or state to which it is compared.
Outcome: What are the patient-relevant consequences of the exposures in which we are interested? We may also be interested in the consequences to society, including cost or resource use. It may also be important to specify the period of interest.

Embase
Try using the Embase PICO search function for a guided way to develop a thorough search for a clinical question.

Question Type	Description	Best Types of Evidence
Therapy	how to select treatments to offer our patients that do more good than harm and that are worth the efforts and costs of using them	Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT)
Diagnostic tests	how to select and interpret diagnostic tests, in order to confirm or exclude a diagnosis, based on considering their precision, accuracy, acceptability, expense, safety, etc	Prospective, blind comparison to gold / reference standard
Prognosis	how to estimate a patient's likely clinical course over time due to factors other than interventions	Cohort Study > Case Control Study > Case Series
Harm/Etiology	how to identify causes for disease (including its iatrogenic forms)	Cohort Study > Case Control Study > Case Series
Prevention	how to reduce the chance of disease by identifying and modifying risk factors and how to diagnose disease early by screening	RCT > Cohort Study > Case Control Study > Case Series