Presentation at HTAi Annual meeting
7/11/08 - The 5th Annual meeting of Health Technology Assessment International (HTAi) was held on July 7th and 8th in Quebec Canada. CEP Analyst Dr. Matthew Mitchell presented on the following topics:
How technology assessment by hospitals differs from technology assessment by payers
In-house technology assessment at a major academic medical center: The first two years
Application of evidence-based decision-making to purchasing of an imaging system
Click on the links above for a copy of presentation slides and posters.
Department of Medicine Research Day Awardee
5/23/08 - Congratulations to Dr. Jeff Miller on winning the 2008 Edward W. Holmes Research Award for Residents and Students in Evaluative Research. Dr. Miller, a third year resident in the Department of Medicine, presented a poster titled "Chlorhexidine versus Povidone-Iodine in Skin Antisepsis: A Systematic Review and Cost Analyses to Inform Initiatives to Reduce Hospital Acquired Infections." It describes the work he performed during his resident elective with Dr. Rajender Agarwal at the Center for Evidence-based Practice. Drs. Miller and Agarwal found that chlorhexidine was more cost-effective than betadine at reducing surgical site infections. Their work informed purchasing decisions and policy changes in UPHS operating rooms.
CEP has a new office location...
3/12/08 - Formerly located on 1 Founders in the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania at 3400 Spruce Street, the Center for Evidence-based Practice has moved to:
3535 Market Street
Mezzanine Level
Please visit Find Us or Contact Us for detailed information.
CEP Sponsors Evidence-based Medicine Resource for UPHS Clinicians
11/1/07 - Beginning November 1, 2007, the UPHS Center for Evidence-based Practice began sponsoring the emailing of InfoPOEMs® to primary care physicians at UPHS, including CPUP and CCA clinicians in Internal Medicine, Gynecology, Family Medicine, and Emergency Medicine. InfoPOEMs® are published by Wiley InterScience®, and are concise daily email summaries of the latest most clinically relevant published peer-reviewed research. After an InfoPOEM® is emailed, it is accessible at all times using the search engine InfoRetriever®. InfoRetriever® also allows you to search other resources like clinical calculators, ICD-9 codes, and abstracts of Cochrane Systematic Reviews. These products were purchased with the hope that the concise, clinically relevant and evidence based information they provide will help UPHS clinicians meet the continual challenge of keeping up to date with the latest study findings that matter most to their patients. The product should also improve accessibility to these findings at and beyond the point of care.
CEP Receives University Research Foundation Award
6/25/07 - The Center for Evidence-based Practice recently received an award from the University Research Foundation of the University of Pennsylvania to support our upcoming conference entitled “Improving the Quality, Safety and Value of Patient Care through Evidence-based Practice: A Multidisciplinary Regional Forum”. The conference is being scheduled for Summer 2008. Please check back for more details on the conference.
The Center for Evidence-Based Practice Announces its New Resident Evidence-based Medicine (EBM) Elective
3/1/07 - The Center for Evidence-based Practice recently introduced its Resident Evidence-based Medicine (EBM) elective to the Graduate Medical Education Committee. Created by co-directors Kendal Williams and Craig Umscheid in collaboration with the Biomedical Library, the curriculum applies EBM precepts to real world problems facing the health system. It is open to residents from all services, and will give practical experience in conducting systematic reviews and meta-analyses. Through the elective, participants have the opportunity to take part in one of CEP’s ongoing reviews of healthcare technologies at the University of Pennsylvania Health System, including evaluations of medical and surgical drugs, devices and processes of care. To learn more about the CEP Resident EBM elective, please click here.
Penn Announces New, Unique “Center for Evidence-Based Practice” To Answer Important Clinical Questions by Examining the Evidence
Center to Offer Evidence-Based Guidelines to Health System to Support Healthcare Quality
7/1/06 - The University of Pennsylvania Health System (UPHS) is launching a new “Center for Evidence-Based Practice” in July 2006. Its purpose is to provide, throughout the entire health system, recommendations -- based on scientific methodology -- on clinical practices and policies. The center will evaluate drugs, as well as non-drug technologies like medical devices and equipment, and processes of care by examining research findings and drawing on the expertise of clinicians and industry experts.
“We wanted to create a forum to develop clinical practices and policies that would span the whole health system. The ultimate goal with this new center is to significantly improve patient safety and clinical outcomes and to reduce occurrences,” states P.J. Brennan, MD, Chief Medical Officer at UPHS, who will ultimately oversee the new center. “We want to take a proactive approach to evaluate new drugs on the market and the processes we use -- to have the evidence to support its use. We will methodically examine the data using scientific standards of analysis, and allow a rigorous review, to bring us to a logical conclusion.”
Once a specific medical issue is identified, the center will form a task force consisting of clinician experts from within UPHS to work alongside the center to examine the issue. The review process may last up to a few months for each issue, with multiple reviews occurring simultaneously. The process of review will start with a comprehensive search and evaluation of the world’s medical literature on the issue at hand. Then, the task force will obtain further input from thought leaders, institutional experts, and industry as appropriate.
When all of the evidence is analyzed, the task force will develop a set of recommended guidelines, which will be disseminated to each hospital’s chief medical officer for further review and application. This effort includes all of UPHS: the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Penn Presbyterian Medical Center and Pennsylvania Hospital, all in Philadelphia.
Brennan adds, “The recommendations these task forces make will stem from a language and process that the medical community at Penn knows and respects. The intention here is to create a center that gathers, examines, and analyzes evidence and then brings clinical experts and industry into the process for their input. It’s a way to honestly analyze what we’re using and doing here at Penn. I know of no other center like this in existence at an academic medical center. We will directly apply evidence to clinical practice.”
Kendal Williams, MD, MPH and Craig Umscheid, MD, both Assistant Professors in the Department of Medicine with formal training in public health and epidemiology respectively, will serve as the center’s co-directors.
“Our main mission is to apply the best research findings from around the globe to our patient population. Penn has the ability to do this well,” comments Williams. "With this new center, we’re also tackling the important issue of clinician-industry relations and quality of care. Often many ‘special interests’ involved in patient care are in-line with our goals as healthcare professionals, but not always. It is the responsibility of a health system to promote the health and protect the safety of its patients. The health system leadership is showing, through this new center, that they take this duty very seriously."
In fact, Williams views the new center as a positive way to create a proactive, collaborative, patient-centered relationship between the health system and the pharmaceutical and medical device industry, based on science.
“This will encourage more scientific dialogue with industry rather than marketing dialogue,” adds Umscheid. “We want to be a resource to help our physicians to make decisions and practice medicine based on findings from valid clinical studies. The topic of our first review is the use of aprotinin, a drug used by anesthesiologists during cardiac surgery to reduce blood loss. Recently, its safety has come into question. We assembled a group of clinical experts from within Penn to help us conduct a clinically relevant, systematic review of the pertinent studies on the topic and we hope to recommend guidelines for its use within the next month.”
Also, the new center is in the process of developing a website to post its recommended guidelines so that they can serve as a resource beyond Penn, to the public and to other healthcare professionals who may be dealing with the same issues in similar patient populations.
