The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME)

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) is an independent global health research center at the University of Washington that provides rigorous and comparable measurement of the world's most important health problems and evaluates the strategies used to address them. IHME makes this information freely available so that policymakers have the evidence they need to make informed decisions about how to allocate resources to best improve population health.

Vision

IHME aspires to make available to the world high-quality information on population health, its determinants, and the performance of health systems. We seek to achieve this directly, by catalyzing the work of others, and by training researchers as well as policymakers. 

Mission

Our mission is to improve the health of the world’s populations by providing the best information on population health.

Research

IHME’s research is organized around answering three critical questions that are essential to understanding the current state of population health and the strategies necessary to improve it.

What are the world's major health problems?

How well is society addressing these problems?

How do we best dedicate resources to maximize health improvement?

Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics

A wonderful article that explains briefly and simply the terms that every health professional should know either in the clinical or in the laboratory setting on Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics

Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics: A Primer for Orthopaedic Surgeons

BY MININDER S. KOCHER, MD, MPH, AND DAVID ZURAKOWSKI, PHD

Investigation performed at Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, Massachusetts

COPYRIGHT © 2004 BY THE JOURNAL OF BONE AND JOINT SURGERY, INCORPORATED

Physiopedia: open access research

More and more research is being brought out from behind cost ineffective paywalls and being made available at low cost or for free. Open access journals make it easy for us to access new research and are listed below:

http://www.physio-pedia.com/Open_Access_Research

INTECH - open access to books covering the fields of Science, Technology and Medicine

InTech is a pioneer and world's largest multidisciplinary open access publisher of books covering the fields of Science, Technology and Medicine. Since 2004, InTech has collaborated with more than 85545 authors and published 2315 books and 7 journals with the aim of providing free online access to high-quality research and helping leading academics to make their work visible and accessible to diverse new audiences around the world.

Our mission is to give all researchers equal opportunity to share ideas, develop their career and for their work to have impact around the world.

EBP in sports Physical Therapy

EVIDENCE – BASED MEDICINE/PRACTICE IN SPORTS PHYSICAL THERAPY

Robert C. Manske and B.J. Lehecka

Abstract

A push for the use of evidence‐based medicine and evidence‐based practice patterns has permeated most health care disciplines. The use of evidence‐based practice in sports physical therapy may improve health care quality, reduce medical errors, help balance known benefits and risks, challenge views based on beliefs rather than evidence, and help to integrate patient preferences into decision‐making. In this era of health care utilization sports physical therapists are expected to integrate clinical experience with conscientious, explicit, and judicious use of research evidence in order to make clearly informed decisions in order to help maximize and optimize patient well‐being. One of the more common reasons for not using evidence in clinical practice is the perceived lack of skills and knowledge when searching for or appraising research. This clinical commentary was developed to educate the readership on what constitutes evidence‐based practice, and strategies used to seek evidence in the daily clinical practice of sports physical therapy.

Keywords: Evidence‐Based Medicine, Sports Physical Therapy, Rehabilitation

PTNow - access to clinical practice guidelines

PTNow is where you live—striving to do the best for your patients, within the constraints of bigger and bigger caseloads, less and less time, and more and more information to look up and assess.

PTNow is in aggressive, constant development. Get an overview of what's available to you and start exploring PTNow.

PTNow's mission is to assist physical therapists and physical therapist assistants in day-to-day practice.

PTNow is designed to:

• Make it easier for you to use the best available evidence in patient care
• Lead you to external resources that have been vetted for relevance and credibility
• Help you improve your efficiency

PTNow will be your "multi-tool":

• Translation tool-for translating research to knowledge for practice
• Implementation tool-for implementing evidence in the evaluation and treatment of patients
• Collaboration tool-for sharing information and strategizing when evidence is lacking

PTNow has the long-term goals of helping the physical therapy profession:

• Reduce unwarranted variation in practice
• Demonstrate the value of physical therapist services to the health care system

The Hooked on Evidence database

The Hooked on Evidence database includes extractions of articles related to physical therapy interventions that have been entered into the database by volunteer contributors. The extractions are not peer reviewed. Because Hooked on Evidence is a continuous work in progress, the database may not contain extracts of all articles published on a given topic. The database does not include practice guidelines, systematic reviews, articles on diagnostic and prognostic tests, or outcome measures.

Ovid online database

Ovid helps researchers, librarians, clinicians, and other healthcare professionals find important medical information so that they can make critical decisions to improve patient care, enhance ongoing research, and fuel new discoveries. We offer a market-leading medical research platform of premium aggregated content and productivity tools that make it easy to quickly search information and make informed decisions on patient care, quality, and clinical outcomes. Every day, the world's leading medical, academic, and corporate institutions, and thousands of their users rely on Ovid for the most efficient, trusted solution that transforms research into results to help improve patient care.

We partner with more than 150 information producers to provide a selection of current, premium resources aggregated on OvidSP — our flagship research platform. We maintain a commitment to content currency, and support archival resources critical to understanding the historical perspective on medical diagnoses and treatment.

Europe PubMed Central

Europe PubMed Central (Europe PMC) offers free access to biomedical literature resources including:

PubMed abstracts (about 28 million)

Europe PMC full text articles (about 2.6 million, of which over 570,000 are Open Access)

Patent abstracts (over 4 million European, US, and International)

National Health Service (NHS) clinical guidelines

Agricola records (500,000)

Supplemented with Chinese Biological Abstracts and the Citeseer database.

Europe PMC is based on PubMed Central (PMC), developed at the NCBI in the USA and is part of a network of PMC International (PMCI) repositories that also includes PMC Canada. It is supported by 19 funders of biomedical research, including charities and government organisations in the UK, Austria, and Italy, led by the Wellcome Trust.

Europe PMC is developed by the European Bioinformatics Institute, The University of Manchester (Mimas and NaCTeM), and the British Library.

EBSCO Information Services

EBSCO Information Services provides a complete and optimized research solution comprised of research databases, e-books and e-journals—all combined with the most powerful discovery service and management resources to support the information and collection development needs of libraries and other institutions and to maximize the search experience for researchers and other end users.

EBSCO offers more than 375 full-text and secondary research databases and over 420,000 e-books plus subscription management services for 355,000 e-journals and e-journal packages. EBSCO also provides point-of-care decision support tools for healthcare professionals and organizational learning resources for training and development professionals.

EBSCO serves the content needs of all researchers whether they access EBSCO resources via academic institutions, schools, public libraries, hospitals and medical institutions, corporations, associations, government institutions, etc.

Access to research in the developing world

ABOUT

Research4Life is the collective name for four public private partnerships which seek to help achieve the UN's Millennium Development Goals by providing the developing world with access to critical scientific research, empowering universities, colleges, research institutes and government ministries as well as non-governmental agencies, extension centres and hospitals.

Developing World Access to Leading Research

The demand for scientific literature in developing countries had gone unfulfilled for many years with thousands of students, researchers and academics struggling to gain access to current scientific information. While students were unable to access the literature and acquire the knowledge they needed, researchers and academics were confronted with mounting difficulties in publishing their findings in peer-reviewed journals, updating their teaching curricula and identifying funding.

The collective name for the four programmes – HINARI, AGORA, OARE and ARDI – Research4Life provides developing countries with free or low cost access to academic and professional peer-reviewed content online. Eligible libraries and their users benefit from:

• Online access to over 30,000  peer-reviewed international scientific journals, books, and databases
• Full-text articles which can be downloaded for saving, printing or reading on screen
• Searching by keyword, subject, author or language
• Resources available in several languages
• Training in information literacy and promotional support

Research4Life is a public-private partnership of the WHO, FAO, UNEP, WIPO, Cornell and Yale Universities and the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers. Working together with technology partner Microsoft, the partnership’s goal is to help attain six of the UN’s eight Millennium Development Goals by 2015, reducing the scientific knowledge gap between industrialized countries and the developing world.

Research databases and tips

Research and Evidence Based Practise will be one of the major parts of your studies, especially in your last years of studying. Here are the most important databases I am using:

http://scholar.google.com

Use it to:

–Find (scientific) articles through the Google search engine

http://wikipedia.org/

Use it to:

–Get some background information

–Get some specific links

–Get a translation

–Find definitions

Don’t use it as the only source (evidence) for your practice

http://www.pubmed.com

Sign up for free NCBI account

Use it to:

Find articles (links and/or full text) about any medical related subject

Check different tabs:

–Limits

–History

–Details

Menu of the left:

–Tutorials

–PubMed central

http://www.thecochranelibrary.com

Sign up for free account

Use it to:

Find (mostly systematic) reviews only

http://www.pedro.org.au/

Use it to:

–Find (full text) articles specifically about physiotherapy

http://www.bib.hva.nl/hva-dm-gezondheidszorg-eng/object.cfm

Use it to:

–Access different databases at the same time

http://www.picarta.com

Use it to:

–Find the place (library) in Holland where you can find a specific journal (hard copy)

Boolean operators form the basis of mathematical sets and database logic.

They connect your seach words together to either narrow or broaden your set of results.

The three basic boolean operators are: AND, OR, and NOT.

Why use Boolean operators?

To focus a search, particularly when your topic contains multiple search terms.

To connect various pieces of information to find exactly what you're looking for.are AND, OR, and NOT

They MUST be capitalized in a search

Use when searching for more than one concept or search statement

When using two or more operators in one search statement:

– the one on the left is processed first

– E.g. influenza AND vaccine OR vaccination would retrieve articles that had both influenza and vaccine and it would also retrieve all articles on vaccination (pneumonia, measles, tetanus, etc.)

–to change the meaning, use parentheses: e.g. influenza AND (vaccine OR vaccination) 

Use the symbol * as a substitute for zero or more characters

–For example, risk* retrieves risk, risks, risk-taking

Uses the first 150 variations with the root

Turns off automatic explosion of MeSH terms

Turns off automatic term mapping

Medical Subject Heading (MeSH)

A controlled vocabulary term used by all the indexers in an organization to ensure consistency in assigning terms to articles (or records) on the same topic. They are also used in searching to avoid having to think of all the possible words that various authors could have used to express the same concept.

Google tips & tricks for students

A beautiful and very useful link with tips & tricks for students conducting online research. Of course, Google is not the only source we, as students, should use, but it is always a starting point when trying to do a research.

(this link is suggested to us by my classmate Nicholas Paul).

The Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine

The Centre for Evidence-based Medicine was established in Oxford as the first of several UK centres with the aim of promoting evidence-based health care. The CEBM provides free support and resources to doctors, clinicians, teachers and others interested in learning more about EBM. Our work falls into three categories: 

1. Research & development on the barriers to and improvement of the clinical practice of evidence

2. Training of students and clinicians in the principles and practice of evidence-based medicine

3. Training the trainers in how to teach EBM and how to do research and development in EBM

source: The Oxford's University Centre for Evidence-based Medicine

Journal of Orthopaedic & Sports Physical Therapy

"The mission of the Journal of Orthopaedic & Sports Physical Therapy is to publish scientifically rigorous, clinically relevant content for physical therapists and others in the healthcare community to advance musculoskeletal and sports-related practice. Now in its 33rd year, the Journal strives to be the preeminent  source of scientific evidence in musculoskeletal and sports-related rehabilitation and health for the global community.

The monthly JOSPT is the official journal of its publishers, the Orthopaedic Section and the Sports Physical Therapy Section of the American Physical Therapy Association (APTA). Through the print and electronic Journal, the publishers seek to offer high-quality research, immediately applicable clinical material, and useful supplemental information in a variety of formats".

Source: the Journal of Orthopaedic & Sports Physical Therapy.

ICF research branch

The ICF model, suggested by the World Health Organization, offers a framework for work among helath professionals. The International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) offers a comprehensive and universally-accepted framework to describe functioning, disability and health in persons with all kinds of diseases or conditions.

The research branch of this model gives a more thorough presentation of this model with the:

ICF Browser
ICF Core Sets
ICF Case studies
ICF Research Branch Newsletter
ICF-based Documentation Form

and a beautiful "ICF eLearning Tool".

Rehabilitation Measures Database

An online tool for clinimetrics and assessment test values. What you can do here is to search for a specific clinimetrics tool, for instance 6 Minutes Walk Test, and find a short description for it and how it can be used together with some really useful documents. An amazing online tool for every Physical Therapist.

Swiss Paraplegic Center: Library

I have created another post for the Swiss Paraplegic Center, but this one here is a presentation of the amazing library and database they offer.

"Our library is specialized in scientific literature and narrative literature. It is not a public library but it is available to the following users:

• Our employees
• Patients and their families in our inpatient and outpatient facilities
• External people who are involved with the topic of spinal cord injury

We offer access to our Library Catalogue in which our media (scientific and narrative literature) are listed. We do not offer an interlibrary loan service.

We also offer access to the ParaDoc Database in which publications on the theme of spinal cord injury from various countries and in various languages are indexed. These include historical books and articles from 1819 onwards (medical research literature is not included). The Paradoc Database is intended to serve as a bibliography rather than as a lending catalogue. The books listed in the database are not available for lending. They can be consulted in the library".

Source: Swiss Paraplegic Center

The Guidelines International Network

The Guidelines International Network, G-I-N, is a global network, founded in 2002. It has grown to comprise 92 organisations and 127 individual members representing 48 countries from all continents (January 2013). The network supports evidence-based health care and improved health outcomes by reducing inappropriate variation throughout the world.

G-I-N mission…

... to lead, strengthen and support collaboration and work within the guideline development, adaptation and implementation community.

Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality

NGC is an initiative of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) , U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NGC was originally created by AHRQ in partnership with the American Medical Association and the American Association of Health Plans (now America's Health Insurance Plans [AHIP]).

The NGC mission is to provide physicians and other health professionals, health care providers, health plans, integrated delivery systems, purchasers, and others an accessible mechanism for obtaining objective, detailed information on clinical practice guidelines and to further their dissemination, implementation, and use.