Description:
This course provides an overview of the health information ecosystem and the role of health information professionals in supporting evidence-based decision making in health and medicine among multiple diverse constituents, include health professionals, researchers, and patients. Topics covered include evidence hierarchies and study designs, constructing and appraising exhaustive and reproducible search techniques for general and specialty medical databases, medical subject headings, and systematic reviews.
Learning Objectives:
Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:
- Understand the role of health information professionals, especially in evidence-based healthcare;
- Compare and contrast definitions of health and biomedical evidence, hierarchies of evidence, and health information;
- Analyze health information needs and develop search strategies to meet those needs;
- Design comprehensive and reproducible search strategies for both general and specialty health sciences bibliographic databases;
- Integrate critical appraisal guidelines and peer feedback when developing search strategies;
- Evaluate the reliability and evidential quality of health and biomedical resources;
- Provide access to authoritative and reliable health and biomedical information to end users, including health professionals, researchers, patients, and the public.