- Last Updated: Dec 6, 2023 7:59 AM
- URL: https://guides.himmelfarb.gwu.edu/ebm
Subjects: Medicine
The first step of EBM is to construct a guiding question.
According to the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine (CEBM), well-formed clinical questions are essential to practicing EBM. "To benefit patients and clinicians, such questions need to be both directly relevant to patients' problems and phrased in ways that direct your search to relevant and precise answers." (CEBM, University of Oxford, Asking Focused Questions)
In a 30-year old male patient diagnosed with depression (P), what is the effect of St. John's wort (I), as compared to SSRIs (C), on reducing depressive symptoms (O) in one year (T)?
Find more examples here:
The PICO format helps you
Adapted from Developing a PICO Question Tutorial: Part 1 of a 2 part tutorial series from Marymount Library's PICO Tutorials.
The PICO model can help you formulate a good clinical question. Sometimes it's referred to as PICO-T, containing an optional 5th factor.
| P - Patient, Population, or Problem |
What are the most important characteristics of the patient? How would you describe a group of patients similar to yours? |
| I - Intervention, Exposure, Prognostic Factor |
What main intervention, prognostic factor, or exposure are you considering? What do you want to do for the patient (prescribe a drug, order a test, etc.)? |
| C - Comparison | What is the main alternative to compare with the intervention? |
| O - Outcome | What do you hope to accomplish, measure, improve, or affect? |
| T - Time Factor, Type of Study (optional) |
How would you categorize this question? What would be the best study design to answer this question? |
Although PICO is the most widely used framework for generating a question, there are some situations in which you might find that a different framework is more appropriate. Here are a few alternatives.
