Dana Haugh
Do you ever wonder why some graphics are more effective than others? Do you want to learn how to create better banners, PowerPoints, flyers, and more? In this presentation, you will learn the fundamentals of good design, get tips and tricks for creating engaging graphics, and learn about free tools to up your design game.
Donna O'Malley
Medical and health sciences librarians are well aware of the importance of publishing journal articles for the careers of the health professionals who use our services. While highly cited journal articles and generous grant funding is the primary route to tenure for biomedical and health sciences faculty at colleges and universities with a research mission, faculty guidelines indicate that many other forms of scholarship are also valued.
This presentation will include examples of the variety of publications identified as scholarship based on University of Vermont promotion and tenure documentation. The presentation will also review the assortment of faculty appointments other than tenure track, and the relative numbers of faculty in these types of positions. These examples will be placed in the context of published literature that investigates definitions of scholarship from a broader perspective.
Implications for health sciences librarians include advising potential new faculty, including non-tenure track faculty such as preceptors, in building the research and scholarship portion of their CVs; the value of educating faculty in the use of additional and alternative metrics; and identifying types of materials appropriate for institutional repositories.
Jillian Silverberg, Rachel C. Lerner
OBJECTIVE/PURPOSE: The objective of this preliminary project is to investigate three different open access evaluation criteria from prominent blacklists, determining areas of commonality and difference as well as identifying overarching themes.
Methods: Three different blacklists’ criteria (Stop Predatory Journals, Cabells, and Bealls) were coded and concatenated. Every criteria point was given an exact or broad match status if it related back to one of the three lists. Concurrent to that process, investigators individually placed each criterion into one or more themes that they identified. The resulting lists will be compared and combined with discussion to resolve any differences.
PRELIMINARY RESULTS: While data analysis is still ongoing, there are currently 137 criteria points across the three lists. Ten major themes have been identified.
DISCUSSION/IMPACT FOR PRACTICE: Evaluating criteria for blacklists is important because they establish journal assessment standards. Extensive lists are comprehensive yet leave little space for interpretation and can inject bias into the evaluation process. Lists that are overly broad may simplify evaluation standards; yet, they offer users room to exercise discretion. Assessing and utilizing multiple criteria allow evaluators and educators to create flexible tools to assist with assessment.
Barbara Ingrassia, Colleen Burnham, Samir Malkani
PURPOSE: The purpose was to evaluate the effectiveness of a one-week elective on human trafficking for third-year medical students to increase their awareness of human trafficking locally, and their knowledge of the signs and symptoms, local, state, and national resources, and possible responses/interventions.
SETTING/PARTICIPANTS: University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, MA, including the EBM resources of its Lamar Soutter Library, and local advocates, service providers, law enforcement agencies, and clinicians with experience in dealing with human trafficking. Enrollment limited to one student per week to facilitate scheduling of meetings with community resources. Availability of community resources varies.
METHODOLOGY: Pre- and post-course discussions, review of daily journal entries, and examination of a project outline.
RESULTS/OUTCOMES: Nine students (4 female and 5 male) have taken this elective between 2013 and 2017. All 9 of the students “agreed to a great extent” that the course stimulated interest in the topic. Eight of the 9 (88%) ”agreed to a great extent” and 1 of the 9 (12%) “agreed to some extent” that the course increased their understanding of the topic.
CONCLUSION: The one-week elective for third-year medical students is an effective way to increase awareness of human trafficking and knowledge of symptoms, resources, and responses.
Stephanie Friree Ford, Lisa Liang Philpotts, Lisa Adriani, Solomon, M., Ettien, A., Alcorn, K., Kilham, J., Philpotts, L.
OBJECTIVES: This survey examined health science librarian salaries within New England. Survey results were compared to previous state and national data.
METHODS: A survey tool adapted from a 2013/2014 survey was distributed through regional librarian listservs.
RESULTS: 106 librarians from the six states in the target region responded to the survey: a 42.91% response rate. Responses came almost equally from academic(54) and hospital(45) librarians, with 7 "other" institutions. AHIP membership was relatively low, 27.36%, and strongly correlated with the perception that institutions valued it. Most institutions offer some support for professional development. We inquired about hours worked weekly and results were divided into two categories: full-time and part-time. 84.91% of respondents reported working full-time. Part-time positions were largely solo librarians (7/16). The average salary for full-time librarians was $75,944 and $67,685 for part-time librarians. Average salary for the entire region across all library types and positions was $71,519.
CONCLUSIONS: Position and location are both significant. There is a large difference between the average salary of department heads and systems librarians, respectively making the highest and lowest annual salaries. At the same time, average salaries for each position type vary by state, and don't necessarily reflect trends for overall average salary. Comparing librarians to all occupations nationally, the profession is not keeping pace with the average in terms of annual salary. In the six-state region surveyed, MA is still doing slightly better than the national average for librarians, while CT is doing significantly better.
Ellen Lutz
Science & Engineering Librarians provided a workshop for rising 8th graders participating in the Eureka! Program through Girls, Inc. of the Valley. After introducing the concept of fake news and giving some tips for evaluation, girls participated in hands-on activities. The level of engagement and enthusiasm shown by the girls thrilled us! I will share details of how we structured our workshop and offer suggestions for adapting it to other audiences.
Caitlin Meyer
What are the different ways to teach the concept of controlled vocabularies? What are you teaching your first-year medical, nursing, and PA students? What strategies work for getting more involved in the curriculum? Formed in early 2018, the Instruction Community of Practice is a place to work through these questions and more. The group brings together teaching librarians/archivists from across the library to develop new skills, determine best practices, collaborate, and discuss future directions for library instruction. This talk will briefly describe communities of practice, outline logistics for starting a group at your institution, and report on notable outcomes from the group’s first 18 months.
Kristine Sjostedt, Sally Gore, Mary Piorun, Lisa Palmer, Ian Roy
The Lamar Soutter Library holds a historical collection of bladder stones donated to us by a local urologist over 30 years ago. It is a permanent display in the Library and was revitalized in the past year by purchasing new display cabinets and refreshing the exhibit images and captions.
In an effort to share this unique collection with a larger audience, we reached out through the Boston Library Consortium (BLC) seeking any member who had the equipment, knowledge, and interest in collaborating on a project to create three-dimensional (3D) digital images of the stones.
Members of the Brandeis University Library responded with interest and after discussing logistics and expected outcomes, their 3D imaging specialist visited UMass Medical School to begin scanning the bladder stones. The 3D scanning is still in process.
When the 3D scanning is complete, we plan to showcase the images in our institutional repository and on our library website. The data sets will also be available to replicate the images and to create 3D printed stones for educational purposes.
Virginia Trow
OBJECTIVE: To prevent closure by adopting a radical approach to hospital library management
METHOD: To deploy fundamental business principles and entrepreneurship
SETTING: A long-established hospital circuit program suffering in the wake of increasing costs, job cuts, and a rapidly changing hospital environment
INTERVENTION: We “reframed” the library program as a failing small business. To “turn it around” we took the strategic initiative to cut costs and reduce expenses and operate “lean”— with fewer staff, automation, strategic collection cuts, and reduced fees. We deeply scrutinized our many services and surveyed our patron base to find progressive opportunities. We dropped TOC and topic alerts services, eliminated travel, and implemented a new virtual library with self-service access for members. We automated our research service and added more self-service functionality using Freshdesk, a leading commercial help desk application. We now conduct aggressive and continual multi-channel branding and promotion to maintain awareness. We instituted a quarterly program readout and are meeting with hospital liaisons every three months. And we put together a library program advisory board with representatives from all hospitals, mirroring a company “key customer” panel, to give us regular input and direction.
CONCLUSION: Hospital librarians need to take aggressive action to remodel their services. Thinking like a business owner, the hospital library manager can better align herself and her service with senior management and hospital goals, putting the library on a stronger footing for survival in the increasingly revenue-driven hospital environment.
Marissa Gauthier, Teri Shiel
In the Spring of 2018, an opportunity arose for librarians at UConn Health to rework their traditional searching-the-literature class for first year medical and dental students. Rather than doing a one-shot session for all 150 students in the large lecture hall, a flipped-classroom approach was used to create an assignment for students to complete during their first two months of classes in the Fall of 2018. This assignment required students to watch videos on various aspects of searching the literature, develop a research question, develop a search strategy, and find an article that answered their research question. They documented this process and pairs of students then met with a librarian for 30 minutes to demonstrate what they learned. Librarians could then address any misinformation or confusion, and demonstrate other library databases. Overall this assignment provided librarians with a great opportunity for getting to know the students and the students appeared to learn a great deal from the experience. However, many students seemed to “reverse engineer” the searching process: they found an article first and then came up with their research question and search terms based on what they found. The assignment is being repeated in the Fall of 2019 with some modifications including a search process that better matches the students’ workflow and content on assessing journal quality.
Nur-Taz Rahman, Rolando Garcia-Milian, Lindsay Barnett, Lei Wang, Judy Spak, Holly Grossetta Nardini, John Gallagher
Precision medicine depends on bioinformatic analyses for patient diagnosis and treatment. These analyses generate huge amounts of data, which pose challenges for researchers in terms of available resources, knowledge, and time. To understand these challenges, we conducted a multimodal needs assessment analysis of 860 Yale-affiliated researchers/clinicians. This study revealed that 78% of respondents lacked required training necessary (e.g. computer coding) to analyze their data, while 54% did not even have access to the appropriate software or hardware. In response to these issues, the Bioinformatics Support Program at the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library (CWML) initiated novel avenues for (1) technical resources; (2) training; and (3) consultations and collaborations. We increased the access to user-friendly software that provides complete data analyses pipelines, and installed a high processing power workstation to fill the digital gap between fee-based, high-performance computing clusters and inadequate processing capabilities of users’ personal computers. To address the training needs, we established a peer-to-peer teaching series, where researchers with bioinformatics skills provide instruction to the wider community. Consequently, the library has become a hub for networking and knowledge sharing. The provision of more in-depth library consultations led to meaningful collaboration projects with researchers, and increased authorship for library personnel in peer-reviewed publications and participation in grants. In this presentation, we will show data and evidence to demonstrate that these combined approaches are impactful and place the CWML at the center of support for bioinformatics and precision medicine on campus.
Katie DeFord, Tom Quinn
Hirsh Health Sciences Library at Tufts University serves a diverse group of patrons, including many graduate students, faculty, and medical professionals. The library maintains a large reserve collection that includes anatomical models, electronic equipment, and more traditional printed materials. Beginning in September 2013, the Hirsh Library instituted a blocking policy in lieu of collecting fines for overdue reserve items. According to the policy, patrons can have their borrowing privileges suspended, to be reinstated depending on previous offenses and length of time the items were kept. This policy has proven effective, and has been generally well-received by the community on the Tufts Health Sciences campus.
Jessie Casella
OBJECTIVE: The librarian, contending with loss of library space, a mainly online library, major campus construction, and busy clinical staff schedules, developed the “librarian comes to you” marketing campaign to make the library resources and services more visible to staff.
METHODS: The librarian created postcards and screensaver slides with the “librarian comes to you” marketing campaign information. The information included library services, library information sessions, and new library resources. The librarian also contacted departments on campus and offsite clinics offering to demonstrate new resources and/or to hold office hours. The librarian also held office hours in the main campus cafeteria one day a week.
RESULTS: The librarian received double the reference requests during the “librarian comes to you” marketing campaign 18/19 fiscal year than in the previous 17/18 fiscal year. The librarian also expects to receive more reference requests during the marketing campaign year than in years prior to the loss of library space. Additionally, the librarian saw an increase in the number of literature search requests during the 18/19 fiscal year than the previous fiscal year.
CONCLUSIONS: Stepping outside of the library space and meeting staff where they were helped make the library more visible and increased library usage. It also allowed the librarian more networking opportunities with departments across campus and at offsite clinics.
Ellen Lutz
Most library outreach activities and events concentrate on sharing what the library can do for those attending. These events often involve investments of time and money, with unpredictable and inconsistent results. The librarians and full-time staff at our small branch Science & Engineering Library decided to flip that model and, driven by our own curiosity about some lesser-known places on campus, embarked on a series of field trips. Instead of telling our hosts what we could do for them, we focused on learning what they do and how we might support their efforts. We feel the positive benefits resulting from this outreach and the connections we made are worth the staff time it cost to plan and attend the field trips.
Donna Belcinski, Anne-Marie Kaminsky, Todd Lane
PURPOSE: To foster a stronger relationship among the YNHHS hospital libraries by creating a unified online catalog accessible to users in all system hospitals outside of Yale-New Haven Hospital.
DISCUSSION: Motivated by the knowledge needs of our frontline staff, the hospital librarians of the YNHHS came together to find ways to make resources available and at the same time, save money. The hospital libraries now report through the same channels, and wish to standardize where and when appropriate through increased collaborative purchases. The first such collaboration was a new online library catalog.
CONCLUSION: Creating the unified catalog resulted in expansion of collections through resource sharing, less duplication of resources among the hospitals, and significant savings by negotiating a multi-year contract with no increases through 5 years.
Donna Belcinski
PURPOSE: To highlight the librarian’s role in helping Greenwich Hospital receive accreditation for its nurse residency program.
DISCUSSION: The Greenwich Hospital Medical Library is deeply involved with the Education Dept. and the Nursing Research Committee at the hospital. When the Education Dept. wished to begin a nurse residency program for new nurses, the library was engaged to help with research into similar programs, to acquire resources necessary for the initiation of the program, to take part in the new nurse orientation, to teach in the Evidence-based Practice class, and to assist the nurse residents with their EBP projects.
CONCLUSION: Through the efforts of several hospital departments, including the library, Greenwich Hospital’s program was accredited with distinction on August 26, 2019.
Veronica Bilenkin
As a consumer health librarian, I help bridge health information gaps between patients and their health care providers (HCPs). One of the most frequent complaints I get from patients and community members is that they feel as though their questions or concerns are not taken seriously by their HCPs. Many studies published in prestigious medical journals highlight the impact that the patient-doctor interaction have on patients’ willingness to follow treatment instructions, continue getting annual checkups, and their overall perception of HCPs and hospitals in general. Therefore, I would like to propose making a poster that highlights ways that medical libraries can encourage better, more productive diagnosis discussions by offering tips for both HCPs and patients to follow.
My primary resource for this poster will be the Institute for Health Care Improvement, and I will specifically highlight the Ask 3 campaign for patients as well as come up with a list of 3 or more ways that HCPs can make an interaction with patients more comfortable and supportive. Medical libraries can be a safe haven for anxious patients who don’t trust HCPs, but I believe that medical librarians can also help facilitate a better dialogue between patients and HCPs.
Sally Gore, Jessica Kilham, Kristine Sjostedt, Jenny Miglus
Identifying an opportunity to harness the strength of collaborating across departments, institutions, and libraries, librarians from the Education and Clinical Services, and Research and Scholarly Communication Services of Lamar Soutter Library (LSL), University of Massachusetts Medical School (UMMS), partnered with the librarian for the Hartford Medical Society Library at Lyman Maynard Stowe Library, UConn Health, to organize an exhibit of historical ophthalmology items at UMMS. The exhibit, “Eyes to the Past,” ran from the summer through the fall, 2019, and included textbooks from the 1800s, prints to test for color blindness, artifacts such as eye surgery kits, glass eyeballs, stereoscopes, and an early 20th century ophthalmoscope. A medical student with an interest in ophthalmology was recruited to research each item on display and provide text for identification cards. The exhibit proved an excellent bridge to form a partnership with the UMass Memorial Eye Center and the UMass Medical School Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences. The Eye Center just welcomed its first class of residents in July, making the timing of the exhibit perfect for the LSL’s outreach efforts. A presentation and reception, co-hosted by the LSL and the Eye Center, proved the “eye-deal” culmination to this successful collaborative effort.
Alexandria Brackett, Katherine Stemmer Frumento, Janene Batten, Melissa Funaro, Alyssa Grimshaw
The Clinical Team at the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library changed significantly in the last two years with four new team members. During the past year, the team promoted its services and provided opportunities for clinical librarians to network with the clinical departments they liaise with.
The team hosted two outreach events targeted to residents and fellows - an educational event focused on clinical resources and a hot chocolate break during the House Staff Appreciation Week. These events allowed the librarians to showcase the resources and services that are important to residents and fellows, as well as promote the librarians as partners in clinical research and patient care.
As the medical library is not physically situated in the hospital, the clinical team also went to the hospital’s two campuses to promote the library’s services. They set up a table outside the cafeterias with promotional items and information for hospital staff. In addition, the evening librarians hosts office hours at the two campuses.
Lastly, to have an easy access point to the clinical librarians, a group email was developed. The email allows patrons to contact any clinical librarian. This allows patrons to have a secondary point of contact in the event of their librarian’s absence.
This presentation will introduce five different ways clinical and hospital librarians reached out to our patron population with an emphasis on event coordination. The librarians will discuss the attendance and use of these events, along with the new perception of the clinical team.
Catherine Carr, Jessica Kilham
In a time of hospital library closures, we were surprised and pleased to be invited by hospital administrators to partner in a library renovation project. Although the original library was designated to become classroom space, the hospital offered to relocate the medical library rather than close it. We participated in planning meetings and were provided with an interim space during construction. The smaller size at the library's new location motivated us to condense the print collection, concentrate on the library essentials, and prioritize our services. An unexpected benefit of the temporary location was visibility of the library to hospital staff who previously had limited exposure. Furthermore, we were able to continue to accommodate original users without disruption. Once the library opened in its permanent location, the new furniture and computers, floor-to-ceiling windows, and central position helped increase library usage. We introduced the renovated library with a well-attended Spring-into-the-Library event, welcoming both new and former library users. We are grateful the hospital recognized the value of library services and the library-as-a-place. We intend to report the reasons why the hospital made this investment in hopes of informing other hospital librarians dealing with possible institutional changes affecting their library's stability.
Leah Honor, David N. Kennedy, Christian Haselgrove, Steven Hodge, Jean Frazier
BACKGROUND: Research reproducibility is often cited as a gold standard for scientific publications, but is hard to accurately determine or quantify. Open access publication has begun to move the field in the direction of greater availability of methods and results, and data sharing policies have made datasets more available, but these two aspects – the source data and published results – are often not enough to actually test the reproducibility of a study’s conclusions. Ambiguities in data subsets, analysis, software, and statistical tests hinder attempts to reproduce findings reported in the literature.
DESCRIPTION: We developed framework for assessing the re-executability of a given publication covering data, software, computational environment, statistics and results. We turned this framework into a survey that could be applied to a predefined set of 50 publications (autism neuroimaging literature published in 2018) in order to better identify where the field was succeeding in instituting reproducibility supporting practices and where authors and publishers are still falling short. Measures of reproducibility across the five domains ranged from high – a majority of articles identify the analysis software used; to moderate – about half indicated data availability or which statistical software was used; to low – availability of detailed results beyond what is reported in text or figures was rare.
APPLICATION: As library and Information professionals, we can use this tool and results like these to reinforce our positions on best practices not only for data sharing or open access publishing, but encouraging higher standards for methodology sharing – defining computational environment parameters, software versions, and analysis code – as well as promoting platforms for more complete data and results sharing.
Lisa Adriani, Daniel G. Kipnis, Ronda Kolbin
Currently, there is very little in the peer-reviewed published literature on how athletic training students conduct research and their exposure to information literacy instruction and libraries. With approximately 393 universities offering athletic training program, understanding these students will help librarians who wish to collaborate and offer information literacy instruction. Our goal as academic librarians is to introduce literature to help address working with athletic training students.
Our poster will share survey results from two east coast universities with accredited athletic training programs. The responses will include answers from 72 students from the following research questions:
1. If a class was offered on how to successfully search literature/research databases, when is your preferred time during the semester?
2. How long will you surf a website or search a database before asking for help?
3. When seeking research assistance, where do you turn first?
4. Which method of communication do you prefer when seeking assistance from the library?
Melissa Funaro, Katherine Stemmer Frumento, Janene Batten, Alexandria Brackett, Alyssa Grimshaw
The Clinical Librarian Team at the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library at Yale consists of 4.5 librarians who provide expert mediated literature searches to its patrons. These patrons include health care professionals from Yale the School of Medicine, School of Nursing, and Yale New Haven Hospital System.
Requests for literature searches are usually received via email. Librarians ask any necessary questions of the patron and then perform the search in relevant databases and resources, scan the results for relevant literature, and then provide the patron with a list of references in word, EndNote, or RefWorks along with the search strategy.
In order to keep track of the searches done by the clinical team, we developed a tool using Qualtrics. This tool allows us to collect data about the searches we provide, which is important for several reasons. We know how many and what kind of searches we do, how much time we spend on the searches, for whom we provide the searches for, and which databases are used. The data collected also allows us to demonstrate our productivity and relevance to administration. Having data to illustrate how we support various audiences is powerful. In addition, knowing who we serve also helps us to know who we aren't serving and to reach out to segments of our population.
Victoria Rossetti, Tess Grynoch, Sarah Levin-Lederer
BACKGROUND: The Lamar Soutter Library serves the UMass Memorial Hospital and the University of Massachusetts Medical School, which consists of the Schools of Nursing, Medicine, and Biomedical Sciences. In pursuit of our mission to help our community in the “creation of knowledge, intellectual growth, and enrichment of the academic experience” the library plans activities, programs, and exhibitions. We recently hosted an NLM traveling Exhibition, “Ill-Conceived and Well-Drawn,” and partnered with the NNLM-NER to create an enriched experience for our users.
DESCRIPTION: The NLM’s traveling exhibit consists of 6 free standing posters and seeks to introduce the concept of graphic medicine. Graphic medicine uses the medium of comics to explore themes of illness, healthcare, and health information from the perspective of the caregiver, the patient, or family members. Graphic medicine can also be used for science communication. While the exhibition was on display in the library, we worked to create programming around the topic of graphic medicine to engage our users and community.
CONCLUSION: As a direct result of hosting the exhibition, the library saw an increase in traffic in the library compared to similar time periods in the past. We also recorded an increase in the use of our graphic medicine collection’s circulation statistics. One particularly successful program was a visit by Matteo Farinella, author of Neurocomic and The Senses. Because we hosted the NLM’s exhibition, we were able to engage targeted populations in meaningful ways and promote library resources.
Eugenia Opuda
BACKGROUND: Many libraries have designed video tutorials covering library resources and information literacy concepts to meet the information needs of distance learning students and to serve as supplemental resources for in-person students. The Health and Human Services (HHS) Librarian at the University of New Hampshire will describe the creation of step-by-step library gif tutorials answering frequently asked questions from the College of Health and Human Services. Each gif, a commonly used image format on the internet, is accompanied with text instructions. The informal text-image combination facilitates multiple levels of accessibility while simultaneously engaging students, and enabling them to quickly find answers in a short amount of time.
METHODS: The HHS Librarian will describe how she integrated creating gif tutorials into her reference workflow, using Camtasia to capture, edit, and create gifs. The librarian combined step-by-step text instructions and short gifs into a LibGuide and used Piktochart, a free infographic-making tool, to increase the visual aesthetic of the guide. Popular online gifs were integrated into the tutorials to appeal to undergraduate audiences and to make the tutorials more engaging.
NEXT STEPS: Initially created to meet the needs of undergraduate and distance learning students in the College of Health and Human Services, the library gif tutorials quickly spread to other departments and was shared with graduate students as well as department faculty. Informal feedback has been positive overall. A more formalized method is needed to measure the impact of the gif tutorials.
Jill Tarabula
This poster reviews the innovative support activities provided by a medical librarian to UVMHN-CVPH Project ECHO HCV. Funded by a federal grant, a small team of professionals from University of Vermont Health Network-Champlain Valley Physicians Hospital (UVMHN-CVPH) in Plattsburgh, provided telehealth 2.0 training to primary care providers across rural upstate New York State. The training provided free continuing medical education credits, while disseminating evidence-based guidelines and best practices in the treatment of patients who were diagnosed with hepatitis C. In addition to traditional research support, the librarian developed a website that received positive feedback from experts in the field nationwide.
Marianne Burke, Benjamin Littenberg
BACKGROUND: Numerous studies with clinician-reported survey data including a large cross-sectional survey (Marshall, 2013), and a randomized controlled-trial (McGowan, 2008) found that clinical evidence sources (CES) are valuable for patient care. In these studies, CES usage resulted in positive findings for practice-level outcomes such as diagnosis and treatment improvement, and clinician time saved. Fewer studies with independent data have evaluated the impact of CES on provider or patient outcomes.
OBJECTIVE: To identify research on the impact of clinical evidence sources (CESs) on clinical practice and patient outcomes based on independent data, and to assess the quality of the research identified.
Methods: Iterative searches in MEDLINE, Google Scholar, and reference lists between 2012 and 2018. Studies measuring an impact of clinical evidence sources (CESs) on clinician practice and patient outcomes were based on independent non-provider reported data were eligible for inclusion.
RESULTS: 14 studies met inclusion criteria. Some positive results were found for single CESs and EBM education with data from patient records. Positive results for one CES were based on large insurance datasets. Other quasi-experimental and randomized trials were negative.
DISCUSSION: Despite provider-reported impact of CESs on clinical outcomes, there is only mixed evidence that CES use improved provider-level or patient-level outcomes based on independent data. Design flaws were noted in several studies.
CONCLUSION: Providers report positive impacts of CESs, but few studies with independent data corroborate these findings. Additional research, using observational data, or measuring outcomes, such as satisfaction with care, could have different results.