IPSWICH, Mass. — October 26, 2016 — Two organizations dedicated to evidence-based healthcare are joining forces to ensure that healthcare professionals can make decisions based on the best available evidence. The partnership between EBSCO Health and McMaster University’s Health Information Research Unit brings together two of the most established services that provide systematic literature surveillance to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of healthcare.
McMaster University is the birthplace of evidence-based healthcare. The Health Information Research Unit was created at McMaster to study and facilitate the transfer of high quality evidence from health care research to practitioners and publishers, via McMaster Premium Literature Service. McMaster PLUS™ uses its Critical Appraisal Process to identify studies and systematic reviews that are scientifically sound. Articles from the 120 top journals that meet McMaster’s scientific criteria are then rated by frontline clinicians for relevance and newsworthiness through the McMaster Online Rating of Evidence (MORE™) system.
By working with McMaster, EBSCO Health products will be uniquely empowered for continuously accessing systematically validated evidence for health care. This will complement EBSCO Health’s Evidence Validation Unit, which employs a systematic seven-step process to identify, critique, summarize and synthesize the best available evidence for clinical decision-making.
EBSCO’s synthesized evidence is presented in DynaMed Plus® in an easy-to-access format so healthcare professionals can use it at the point of care to make the best evidence-based clinical decisions as quickly as possible. The evidence surveillance also informs Nursing Reference Center™, Rehabilitation Reference Center™ and Patient Education Reference Center™ to provide the best current information to professionals and patients across the health care system.
McMaster and EBSCO Health will also team up to provide free updates of highly impactful evidence, organized and delivered with cutting edge technology. Currently, more than 200,000 subscribers receive recent and relevant studies that have been rated through the McMaster MORE system. With an overwhelming number of studies being published, this service allows healthcare professionals to have a resource that alerts them to the latest and best evidence in their particular field. Connecting this resource with EBSCO Health resources that provide context across healthcare will enhance the relevance and utility for these updates.
EBSCO Health Senior Vice President of Medical Product Management Betsy Jones says that this partnership will promote the use of systematically validated evidence. “McMaster is well-known throughout the world for its pioneering efforts to disseminate evidence-based information. This is closely aligned with EBSCO Health’s commitment to provide the global healthcare community with the information they need to make informed decisions. The integration between the McMaster and EBSCO Heath systems of literature surveillance will ensure that users of all EBSCO Health products have rapid access to the most valid evidence for clinical care.”
McMaster Industrial Liaison Office Chief, Gay Yuytung, provides the McMaster view on the agreement. “This joint venture with EBSCO provides McMaster’s Health Information Research Unit with a great opportunity to enhance generation and dissemination of health knowledge. McMaster and a world-class publisher like EBSCO can contribute very different but highly complementary components to their common goal of knowledge translation, aiming to improve the capabilities of clinicians for timely application of current best evidence for health care.”
About McMaster University’s Health Information Research Unit (HiRU)
HiRU was created in 1987 to study the problems in dissemination and uptake of validated health care knowledge, and to develop and test and deliver solutions to these problems. Beginning with more informative abstracts for journal articles in 1987, HiRU has created many innovations for knowledge transfer including ACP Journal Club (sponsored by the American College of Physicians), Evidence-Based Medicine (sponsored by the BMJ), and numerous internet-based “best evidence” services for clinicians, publishers, professional organizations, and others around the world.
About EBSCO Health
EBSCO Health, part of EBSCO Information Services, is a leading provider of clinical decision support solutions, healthcare business intelligence, and medical research information for the healthcare industry. EBSCO Health users include professionals in medicine, nursing, and allied health. Flagship products include CINAHL®, DynaMed Plus®, Nursing Reference Center™, clinical e-books and e-journals, EBSCO Discovery Service™, licensed databases (such as MEDLINE®), plus EBSCONET®. EBSCO databases are powered by EBSCOhost®, the electronic resource favored by libraries around the world.
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For more information, please contact:
Kathleen McEvoy
Vice President of Communications
(800) 653-2726 ext. 2594
kmcevoy@ebsco.com
