~Partnership Brings Together Two of the Best Systems for Monitoring High-Quality Medical Research to Impact Patient Care ~

IPSWICH, Mass. — October 20, 2010 — McMaster University’s Health Information Research Unit and DynaMed™ from EBSCO Publishing have partnered to help physicians understand the scope of the medical research being published every day. Thanks to the agreement, the two best systems for keeping up with medical research have come together in an international partnership to identify practice-changing evidence for physicians and to include that knowledge directly into the DynaMed experience. Through this unique partnership, physicians from around the world, combining the McMaster University and DynaMed communities, will rate the most important research articles for specific relevance at the point of care and identify the practice-changing articles across all disciplines.

Given the number of medical journals, the amount of medical research being published each week is overwhelming. The sheer volume of the new information being published makes it impossible for a practicing physician to read every article or to identify which articles contain research that needs to be put into practice. Having a mechanism to synthesize the new medical evidence into a useable format and rate the relevance is becoming more and more essential. The agreement between McMaster University and DynaMed provides physicians with the information they need to know—the best available evidence—when and where they need it most—at the point of care.

McMaster University and DynaMed add context to the medical literature allowing hospitals and healthcare providers to make decisions based on the best available evidence. The Health Information Research Unit at McMaster University has established a process to identify high-quality medical research and has recruited a global network of thousands of physicians spanning all disciplines that evaluates the clinical relevance and newsworthiness of high quality research articles. DynaMed is a point-of-care clinical reference and decision support resource that identifies the best available evidence; uses a team of physicians, health professionals from other disciplines and scientists trained in research methodology to critically analyze the content; summarizes research evidence for rapid application; and makes the information available for physicians to find in the moment-to-moment context of patient care.

By combining these systematic and rigorous methods for identifying and analyzing medical research and adding the vast array of practicing physicians (who are able to reflect current practice needs), physicians using DynaMed will be able to quickly identify the practice-changing medical research results across all medical disciplines.

About EBSCO Publishing
EBSCO Publishing is the world’s premier database aggregator, offering a suite of more than 300 full-text and secondary research databases. Through a library of tens of thousands of full-text journals, magazines, books, monographs, reports and various other publication types from renowned publishers, EBSCO serves the content needs of all medical professionals (doctors, nurses, medical librarians, social workers, hospital administrators, etc.). The company’s product lines include proprietary databases such as CINAHL®, DynaMed™, Nursing Reference Center™, Patient Education Reference Center™, Rehabilitation Reference Center™, Rehabilitation & Sports Medicine Source™ and SocINDEX™ as well as dozens of leading licensed databases such as MEDLINE®, PsycARTICLES® and PsycINFO®. Databases are powered by EBSCOhost®, the most-used for-fee electronic resource in libraries around the world. For more information, visit the EBSCO Publishing Web site at: www.ebscohost.com, or contact: information@ebscohost.com.

About the Health Information Research Unit (HIRU), McMaster University
HIRU is in the Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics at McMaster University, where the concepts and name of evidence-based medicine originated. HIRU conducts research in the field of health information science and is dedicated to the generation of new knowledge about the nature of health and clinical information problems, the development of new information resources to support evidence-informed health care, and the evaluation of various innovations in overcoming health care information problems. HIRU provides quality-and relevance-assessed research evidence for many evidence-based publications.

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For more information, please contact:
Kathleen McEvoy
Public Relations Manager
EBSCO Publishing
(800) 653-2726 ext. 2594
kmcevoy@ebscohost.com