A continuing medical education program based in high quality evidence to transfer knowledge and to improve practice for health care professionals

• Main Author: Moja, Lorenzo P
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: Open University 2014
• DOI: 10.21954/ou.ro.0000d695

This Doctoral of Philosophy program aimed to evaluate an initiative to foster knowledge translation through a national, interactive, and distant continuing education program based on an evidence based medicine point-of-care information service. It further explored the quality of the contents used in ECCE as compared to its market competitors (i.e. other evidence-based practice point-ofcare services). Our randomised controlled trial of nearly 200 physicians revealed little evidence for a difference in the health care knowledge of physicians who were exposed to versus those who were not exposed to contents derived from a point-of-care service. These results suggest that changes in behaviours, a direct consequence of changes in knowledge, may be difficult to obtain or might not be attainable at all, at least when a single continuing medical education program is implemented for short time period. In terms of determining the best available online resources among the 18 authoritative point-of-care services for guidance in clinical decision making that were assessed, only a minority satisfied the quality criteria (coverage of medical conditions, editorial quality, evidence-based methodology, and speed of updating), with none excelling in all. Publishers should continue to invest in the development of such products and improve their efficient use in continuing educational programs. These results might influence how international research and editorial groups that advocate evidence-based decision-making and evidence syntheses think about dissemination.