Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA
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J Am Med Inform Assoc · Mar 2004
Do clinicians use online evidence to support patient care? A study of 55,000 clinicians.
To determine clinicians' (doctors', nurses', and allied health professionals') "actual" and "reported" use of a point-of-care online information retrieval system; and to make an assessment of the extent to which use is related to direct patient care by testing two hypotheses: hypothesis 1: clinicians use online evidence primarily to support clinical decisions relating to direct patient care; and hypothesis 2: clinicians use online evidence predominantly for research and continuing education. ⋯ Clinicians' online evidence use increases with patient admissions, supporting the hypothesis that clinicians' use of evidence is related to direct patient care. Patterns of evidence use and clinicians' self-reports also support this hypothesis.