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[Scientific evidence-based cardiology: the principles and practice]
1Centro de Estudos de Medicina Baseada na Evidência, Faculdade de Medicina de Lisboa.
Insights
Evidence-based cardiology (EBC) helps clinicians manage rapidly advancing medical information and scarce resources. Practicing EBC improves decision-making, patient communication, and medical education for cardiologists.
Area of Science:
- Cardiology
- Medical Informatics
Context:
- Cardiologists face challenges in staying updated with rapid diagnostic and therapeutic advancements.
- Increasing societal demand for high-quality, cost-effective healthcare necessitates rigorous clinical decision-making.
Purpose:
- This review introduces evidence-based cardiology (EBC) as a solution to these challenges.
- It outlines the principles, practice, and methodological steps of EBC.
Summary:
- EBC involves formulating structured clinical questions, identifying and critically appraising scientific evidence, and applying this evidence to individual patient cases.
- The process begins with the patient's needs and integrates the best available scientific evidence.
Impact:
- EBC enables cardiologists to stay current with medical literature, refine information selection, and enhance clinical decision confidence.
- It reduces practice variation, improves doctor-patient communication, and serves as a valuable tool for continuous medical education.
Abstract:
Every clinical cardiologist, no matter what the clinical work (invasive or non-invasive), has to face several problems concerning clinical knowledge and medical information in everyday practice. Diagnostic and therapeutic advances in cardiology are occurring at an increasing pace and every cardiologist responsible for patient care in hospitals, clinics or emergency rooms needs to be up-to-date in order to provide the best possible medical care. On the other hand, society is increasingly making doctors accountable for the provision of good quality care in a cost-effective way. In the context of scarce resources, this situation requires a rigorous and rational approach by the individual cardiologist. These apparent contradictions can be solved by practicing evidence-based cardiology (EBC). This review introduces the concept of EBC, its principles, practice, and methodological steps: 1) formulation of a structured clinical activity; 2) scientific evidence; 3) critical appraisal of this evidence using explicit methods; and 4) synthesis and practical application of this evidence. In this sense, EBC arises from the patient, and after the best possible scientific evidence is selected, it is applied to the individual case. EBC allows the individual cardiologist to keep up with the medical literature while improving reading habits and the form in which relevant clinical information is selected. It also increases confidence in the clinical decisions, reducing practice variation as well as improving doctor-patient communication. Lastly EBC can be used as a powerful tool for pre, post and continuous medical education.