Title

Authors

Affiliation

¹Oral Biology & Medicine, School of Dentistry, UCLA; ²Evidence-Based Study Group, Evidence-Based Decisions Practice-Based Research Network (ebd-pbrn.org); ³Director, IT Software Development, Live Nation.

Email

chiappelli@dentistry.ucla.edu; *Corresponding author

Article Type

Current Trends

Date

Received November 12, 2011; Accepted November 16, 2011; Published November 20, 2011

Standards of care pertain to crafting and implementing patient-centered treatment interventions. Standards of care must take into consideration the patient’s gender, ethnicity, medical and dental history, insurance coverage (or socioeconomic level, if a private patient), and the timeliness of the targeted scientific evidence. This resolves into a process by which clinical decision-making about the optimal patient-centered treatment relies on the best available research evidence, and all other necessary inputs and factors to provide the best possible treatment. Standards of care must be evidence-based, and not merely based on the evidence – the dichotomy being a critical in contemporary health services research and practice. Evidence-based standards of care must rest on the best available evidence that emerges from a concerted hypothesis-driven process of research synthesis and meta-analysis. Health information technology needs to become an every-day reality in health services research and practice to ensure evidence-based standards of care. Current trends indicate that user-friendly methodologies, for the dissemination of evidence-based standards of care, must be developed, tested and distributed. They should include approaches for the quantification and analysis of the textual content of systematic reviews and of their summaries in the form of critical reviews and lay-language summaries.

Keywords

evidence-based decision-making, standard of care, systematic reviews, text mining, contextual analysis, quantification

Citation

Barkhordarian et al. Bioinformation 7(6): 315-319 (2011)
 

Edited by

P Kangueane

ISSN

0973-2063

Publisher

Biomedical Informatics

License

This is an Open Access article which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. This is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.