Clinicians are increasingly turning to electronic data sources to aid in clinical decision-making; nevertheless, clinician time is limited, so summarized and synthesized evidence is required. Researchers created Clinical Answers (CA) to meet this requirement; the CA is a synthesized evidence-based summary that aids clinical decision-making at the point of care. This paper aims to present the results of a survey conducted to evaluate and improve the CA format. Pediatricians were emailed an online survey, then uploaded on a website dedicated to child health clinical standards. Most descriptive statistics were used in quantitative data analysis, whereas content analysis was used in qualitative data analysis.
The survey received responses from 83 pediatricians. The majority of respondents (93%) found the CA useful or very useful and agreed or strongly agreed that the layout effectively allowed them to discover key information quickly (82%). Quantitative and qualitative data indicated that respondents thought the linked figures and tables should have less detail (P=0.0002). Overall, respondents considered the CA had sufficient depth in most sections.
Researchers made major and small changes to the CA format in response to the quantitative and qualitative survey answers, such as the removal of forest plots, the addition of links in each supplement to return the user to the front page, and the addition of an ‘Implications for practice’ section to the CA. The research team has already begun developing CAs to support busy physicians in their day-to-day clinical practice by giving high-quality information for decision-making at the point of care.
Reference:bmcpediatr.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2431-12-34
