Helping doctors, nurses and other health professionals find up-to-date research evidence so they can provide the best care to patients.

An Introduction

Doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals need to keep up-to-date if they are to provide optimal care to patients. However the published medical literature doubles every two months, making this a considerable challenge. Billions are spent generating, collecting, systematically reviewing and curating research findings but there is a large gap between what we know works or does not work and what happens in practice. There are lots of reasons for this large “implementation gap”. BestEvidence sets out to overcome some of the barriers to getting research evidence into practice.

The BestEvidence app puts the best available evidence at the fingertips of clinicians through an intuitive interface which searches millions of indexed, continually updated, and quality ranked articles, and presents them in order of relevance. It enables users to track and manage their activity and knowledge and share this with colleagues.

Benefits of using BestEvidence

Individuals:

  • Enables uncertainties to be addressed quickly wherever and whenever information is needed
  • Provides a search facility linked to best quality databases. You ask a question and the best evidence is put at the top of a list of references
  • Reduces the barriers to finding and using evidence
  • Nurtures skills in, and provides tools for, critical appraisal of research evidence
  • Is pragmatic - nudging people towards better decisions rather than setting unachievable standards of perfect evidence-based practice

Communities & Organisations:

  • Helps build a Bank of pre-appraised literature on different medical topics, enabling professionals to share and look for relevant analysis of a subject done by colleagues in their field or organisation.
  • Promotes sharing of knowledge
  • Promotes reflective practice
  • Creates cultural change in organizations so they are supportive of EBP
  • Creates life-long learners

See How It Works

Evidence in Practice

The following are examples of where using evidence or failing to use evidence has had an important affect on patient outcomes.

Blog

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How can BestEvidence Help You?

  • A way of finding evidence to address your uncertainties whenever and wherever these arise.
  • Enables you to filter by type of evidence you are looking for, for example, systematic reviews, controlled trials or guidelines.
  • Keeps you to keep a history of searches you have made and the papers you clicked through to.
  • Enables you to make notes about why you did a search or what you thought about or found in a paper.
  • You can get messages about important new evidence that has implications for nursing practice that the RCN send out.
  • Enables uncertainties to be addressed quickly wherever and whenever information is needed
  • Provides a search facility linked to best quality databases. You ask a question and the best evidence is put at the top of a list of references
  • Reduces the barriers to finding and using evidence.
  • Nurtures skills in, and provides tools for, critical appraisal of research evidence
  • Is pragmatic - nudging people towards better decisions rather than setting unachievable standards of perfect evidence-based practice

Features

BestEvidence is convinced that the barriers to using best evidence cannot be ignored. Our services are designed to overcome or significantly minimise any barriers. We will allow all professionals to have easy access to research that has been professionally reviewed and is considered highly important and most importantly relevant to their immediate needs. Additional added value services address typical needs of professionals and the organisations they relate to. There are 3 fundamental app services and a fourth training and consultancy service. These are:

Note Functionality

Note Functionality

A free access basic app, including a note functionality, digital critical appraisal checklists and push notifications. The BestEvidence app.  several orders of magnitude more content than competitors.

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence

A chargeable premium app which has additional services such artificial intelligence to help users ask the most appropriate questions, critical appraisal checklists and Continuous Professional Reports (CPDs) on the number of hours spent checking research and doing critical appraisals.

Check Data in Real-time

Check Data in Real-time

Customised apps suitable for organisations such as hospital trusts and Royal Colleges that need to ‘push out’ information, have ready access to documents and their own medical learning reviews and have real-time data analytics of usage, hot topics etc.. For example to disseminate evidence or support their staff in undertaking ‘Evidence Based Practice (EBP)’, provide a “Critical Appraisals Library (CAT Bank)” that will be quality assured, pre-appraised evidence summaries (like Best Bets) and a large anonymised database about people’s uncertainties and how they search for and use information in their specialty, which can be analysed to generate new knowledge about health information behaviours.

Chat with Experts

Chat with Experts

We also offer a sub-cohort of users, the BestEvidence champions, trained in EBP and who can be used as a resource in the future. This can include training and consultancy advice. Publications in reports, peer-reviewed journals and blogs.