FOR PATIENTS

The information you need to work together with your provider to make the best medical decisions possible – freely available to everyone

Your health is important to both you and your provider, which is why the important medical decisions should always be shared. The “Choosing Wisely” campaign is built around this premise – the idea that we should all be working together to choose the right tests for you based on your specific clinical indications.

The Harvard Library of Evidence takes content from Choosing Wisely and a number of other trusted sources, grades it transparently, and makes it freely available to anyone to incorporate into a clinical decision support system. We are beginning by focusing on imaging, but will soon be moving on to all other diagnostic tests in order to help you and your care team decide on the best testing strategy for you.

  1. Optimize clinician’s time and workflow
  2. Improve quality of care
  3. Get more value from your EMR
  4. Reduce alert fatigue
  5. Reduce costs

PUBLICATIONS

The Annual Meeting of the Medical Library Association

P.A. Bain, R. Khorasani, D. Osterbur, A.S. Raja
May 15-20, 2015, Austin TX Making the Grade: Curating the Harvard Medical School Library of Evidence

The goal of the Harvard Medical School Library of Evidence is to create a sustainable public repository of clinical evidence that will enable and promote broad and consistent evidence-based medicine and improve the quality and efficiency of care. In part a response to recent federal legislation requiring evidence-based clinical decision support systems to be included as part of certified EHRs, the Library includes specific statements of clinical logic representing recommendations extracted from published guidelines or other trusted sources along with an objective quality rating of the evidence underlying each recommendation (level of evidence/grade of recommendation). This quality rating is applied and annotated by librarians with broad medical knowledge but without inherent conflicts of interest or profession-related biases and is validated by a physician with subject area expertise. The Library of Evidence will be distributed in the public domain in a structured form that can be incorporated into healthcare information systems.

"iTunes" for Evidence: the HMS Library of Evidence

Ramin Khorasani, MD MPH
Description:

The Library of Evidence (LOE; http://libraryofevidence.med.harvard.edu) or ‘iTunes for Evidence’ is a project of the HMS Countway Library of Medicine, in collaboration with Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and representatives of other HMS hospitals and other Harvard institutions. The goal of the LOE is to create a sustainable, public repository of health IT consumable, objectively scored medical evidence to enable and promote the broad and consistent practice of evidence-based medicine. Launched in 2015, the LOE’s initial focus will be in medical imaging, in part to support the implementation of the Public Law 113-93 (Promoting Evidence-Based Care; Section 218b of Protecting Access to Medicare Act of 2014) in January of 2017.

Biography:

Ramin Khorasani, MD, MPH is Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School, Distinguished Chair, Biomedical Informatics; Director, Center for Evidence-Based Imaging (CEBI) and Vice Chair of Radiology at Brigham & Women’s Hospital. Dr. Khorasani and his colleagues at CEBI are broadly focused on improving quality and reducing waste in patient care using advanced health IT tools. Promoting evidence-based imaging using clinical decision support (CDS) has been a major focus for the past decade. 
 rkhorasani@partners.org