Evidence-Based Health Care
Evidence-based health care is the foundation of clinical practice. Clinical informaticians must understand the benefits and limitations of study design, assess and grade the quality of the evidence base, and how research results are incorporated into guidelines to inform the design and development of applied informatics tools such as clinical decision support systems. While traditional approaches to evidence generation are still foundational, there are also ways to generate evidence without conducting a clinical trial such as through the use of electronic health record data in the context of learning health systems. More than ever, evidence is being produced and evolving rapidly. Thus, it is challenging to navigate the complexities of how to take mixed evidence and guidelines and transform them into informatics tools that consider benefits, risks, and potential biases. This chapter examines the methods and processes for generating evidence and translating them into clinical guidelines and practice. The chapter further discusses the role of clinical informatics in supporting evidence-based health care delivery.
