Overview of EBM
Along with best research evidence and patient values, this clinician-based element completes the evidence-based medicine triad.
What is clinical expertise (or clinical judgment)?
When a dataset contains extreme outliers, this measure identifies the middle observation after values are ordered.
What is the median?
Five patients with an unusual adverse reaction are described without a formal control group. This observational design generates hypotheses.
What is a case series?
Testing asymptomatic people to identify who needs additional evaluation, rather than confirm a diagnosis, describes this process.
What is screening?
Disease, injury, and disability are measures of this, in contrast to mortality, which concerns death.
What is morbidity?
Replacing a town’s contaminated water supply to stop disease before it occurs is an example of this level of prevention.
What is primary prevention?
The proportion of residents who currently have asthma, including old and new cases, measures this disease-frequency concept.
What is prevalence?
In a PICO question, this letter names the patient group or clinical problem being studied.
What is P (patient, problem, or population)?
A researcher recruits the patients easiest to access in the clinic. This nonprobability method threatens sample representativeness.
What is convenience sampling?
A survey measures the current prevalence of vaping among PA students in one week. This is the study design.
What is a cross-sectional study?
A highly sensitive test has few false negatives; when negative, it can help perform this diagnostic action.
What is rule out disease (SnNout)?
Providers routinely send required case reports to the health department, but underreporting may occur. This is the surveillance approach.
What is passive surveillance?
Screening an asymptomatic patient for colorectal cancer is typically this level of prevention.
What is secondary prevention?
The number of newly diagnosed cases of asthma over one year measures this disease-frequency concept.
What is incidence?
This evidence resource is especially useful for systematic reviews of healthcare interventions.
What is the Cochrane Library?
A correlation coefficient of -0.85 indicates a strong relationship in this direction.
What is a negative (inverse) linear relationship?
Investigators recruit patients with pancreatic cancer and patients without it, then compare their past exposures. This study design begins with disease status.
What is a case-control study?
A highly specific test has few false positives; when positive, it can help perform this diagnostic action.
What is rule in disease (SpPin)?
An EHR automatically sends case information to a public health agency when relevant clinical codes appear. This reporting method is abbreviated eCR.
What is electronic case reporting?
Providing rehabilitation after a disabling stroke is this level of prevention.
What is tertiary prevention?
Host, agent, and environment are the three vertices of this framework of disease causation.
What is the epidemiologic triad?
A PA asks whether a new anticoagulant reduces recurrent stroke compared with standard care. This is the fundamental EBM question type.
What is a therapy question?
A study compares blood pressure in the same patients before and after a new medication. This inferential test compares their paired means.
What is a paired t-test?
Random assignment in a clinical trial principally reduces this threat by balancing known and unknown prognostic factors.
What is selection bias (or confounding from unequal baseline groups)?
Among all patients who test positive, this measure estimates the fraction who truly have the disease.
What is positive predictive value (PPV)?
A laboratory sends a reportable pathogen result to the health department. Under the lecture’s Florida framework, this clinician duty still remains.
What is the practitioner’s independent duty to report?
The Public Health 3.0 model asks public health leaders to serve in this cross-sector coordinating role.
What is Chief Health Strategist?
An outbreak curve rises rapidly after one brief shared exposure, then declines without secondary waves. This is the outbreak pattern.
What is a point-source (single-exposure common-source) outbreak?
A clinic redesigns its discharge process to shorten patient wait time. This is "doing things right," rather than EBM’s "doing the right things."
What is performance improvement (PI)?
A clinical trial reports p = 0.03 at alpha = 0.05. This decision is appropriate even though clinical importance remains uncertain.
What is reject the null hypothesis?
Investigators classify participants by smoking exposure and follow them for future lung disease. This is the observational study design.
What is a prospective cohort study?
An instrument always reads 8 mmHg too high. This type of error mainly undermines measurement accuracy.
What is systematic error (systematic bias)?
Public health workers repeatedly contact clinics and review records specifically to find unreported disease cases. This is the surveillance method.
What is active surveillance?
A county health department systematically collects and analyzes local data to identify key needs. This assessment is abbreviated CHA.
What is a Community Health Assessment (CHA)?
Plotting infections by address to reveal geographic clusters uses this geospatial technology.
What is a geographic information system (GIS)?