EBM Project

For students rotating at the Rush or Rush Oak Park sites, you’ll complete your EBM project in conjunction with our Sim Lab sessions. For students rotating at Stroger Cook County Hospital, you’ll complete a portfolio project and more information will be provided at your orientation.

For your EBM project we’ll be following the four steps of EBM. More information can be found at theEBMproject website.

1. ASK a clinical question
2. ACQUIRE the evidence
3. APPRAISE the paper
4. APPLY it to your patient

For the assignment we’ll go through all four components by submitting a PICO question and presenting an article, and

1. ASK a question

In the first week of the rotation, each student finds a case in which you have a question. You should incorporate all the pertinent patient data. If you can find the answer to that question in a textbook, it’s considered background information. If the answer is still under discovery and you need to go to the literature, this is a foreground question.

The next step is to form the foreground question into one that for which we can search for an answer. The most commonly used approach is the PICO question. In this framework, there are 4 components to every clinical question, the Patient population, Intervention, Comparison and Outcome (PICO).

You’ll be required to submit your PICO question by the end of the first week of the rotation. Questions submissions will be done via a google form which will be emailed to the group at the start of the rotation.

Next, we’ll choose which question we’d like to look up as a group. Instead of each student looking up their own individual questions, you are going to look at all the questions and choose which one you’re most interested in looking up. This can be your own question, but you may find that you’re more interested in one of your classmates questions. We’ll take votes for your first choice and second choice question, to help us break any ties that may occur. This voting process will happen over e-mail, so please make sure to respond so your vote gets counted! After votes are in, you’ll be split into two groups, and each group will be assigned a PICO question based off the voting results.

2. ACQUIRE the evidence

For the article presentation, Each student will find a different article that addresses the group’s PICO question. Communicate to be sure each student has a different article. If two students pick the same article, neither gets credit. Use PubMed, Google Scholar, Scopus or any search strategy that finds you credible sources. Wikipedia and Medscape do not count.

3. APPRAISE the literature

Use the Sackett and Guyatt rubrics to evaluate the article you found. Every student will present their article to the group. No slides. Less than 5 minutes each. Then as a group come to a consensus opinion based on all your articles, regarding the recommendation to follow.

Here are the rubrics to evaluate articles based on question-type.

• Appraising articles on therapy
• Appraising articles on diagnosis
• Appraising articles on harm
• Appraising articles on prognosis
• Appraising systematic reviews

You should have access to VIEW these rubrics, but not to edit them. In order to edit them, you’ll need to use it on Google Docs or as a Word document.

If you would like to use this as a Google Document. Go to the File menu and pick “Make a Copy…” This will save a copy within your own Google Drive which you can edit.

If you prefer using Microsoft Word, you can download a copy as a .docx file. To do this, go to the File menu at the top and pick “Download As…” From the next menu, pick Microsoft Word. Then you should be able to open it in Word.

4. APPLY the results to your patient

Return to the initial patient presentation and apply your consensus recommendation. How would you have managed the patient differently?

Timeline for EBM Project: