LibGuides: Physician's Assistant: PICO/Evidence Based Practice

Open Access Resources

Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's (AHRQ)
Under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has numerous resources relevant to evidence based practice.
Complementary & Alternative Medicine (CAM) Evidence-Based Medicine
Created for health care practitioners, a selection of EBM resources on topics ranging from acai to zinc.
EBM Tools
Oxford University is ranked number one in the world for medical sciences and is home to the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine (CEBM). As part of the UK’s leading centre for academic primary care, the CEBM is a renowned global centre for evidence-based medicine research and learning.
PubMed Clinical Queries
Identifies systematic reviews and other similar types of studies found in biomedical journals indexed in PubMed.
Trip Medical Database
Trip is a clinical search engine designed to allow users to quickly and easily find and use high-quality research evidence to support their practice and/or care.

Framing Questions with PICO
This video will help you learn to break a research question down into its important concepts. Created by the librarians at Yale's Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library.
PICO Chart
Use this chart to identify types of clinical questions, where to find the evidence, and determine the level of evidence.
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Courtesy of GVSU Libraries

PICO(T) stands for:

Population/ Patient Problem: Who is your patient? (or disease, health status, age, gender, race, sex)
Intervention: What do you plan to do for the patient? (specific tests, therapies, medications)
Comparison: What is the alternative to your plan? (for example, no treatment, different type of treatment, etc.)
Outcome: What is it that you want to accomplish, improve, measure, etc. (fewer symptoms, no symptoms, full health, etc.)
Time: What is the time frame to achieve the outcome? (This element is not always included, so that's why it's in parentheses.)

Use the PICO(T) format to formulate questions. Your PICO(T) question will fall under one of these types:

Therapy: What is the best treatment or intervention?
Prevention: How can I prevent this problem?
Diagnosis/Assessment: What is the best way to assess or best diagnostic test for this patient?
Etiology/Causation: What causes this problem?
Prognosis: What are the long term effects of this problem?
Meaning:/Quality of Life: What is the meaning of this experience for patients?

It's important to know the type of question you're asking because it will help you focus on the most appropriate research:

Therapy	Randomized controlled trials
Prevention	Randomized controlled trials, Cohort studies, Case control studies
Diagnosis	Prospective, blind controlled comparison to gold standard
Etiology	Randomized controlled trials, Cohort studies, Case control studies
Prognosis	Cohort studies, Case control studies, Case series/Case report
Meaning	Qualitative studies