Whois & Analysis for clincalc.com

Evidence-based medicine (EBM) is an approach to medical practice intended to optimize decision-making by emphasizing the use of evidence from well-designed and -conducted research.

Although all medicine based on science has some degree of empirical support, EBM goes further, classifying evidence by its epistemologic strength and requiring that only the strongest types (coming from meta-analyses, systematic reviews, and randomized controlled trials) can yield strong recommendations; weaker types (such as from case-control studies) can yield only weak recommendations.

The term was originally used to describe an approach to teaching the practice of medicine and improving decisions by individual physicians about individual patients.

Use of the term rapidly expanded to include a previously described approach that emphasized the use of evidence in the design of guidelines and policies that apply to groups of patients and populations ("evidence-based practice policies").

It has subsequently spread to describe an approach to decision-making that is used at virtually every level of health care as well as other fields (evidence-based practice).

Pharmacokinetics (from Ancient Greek pharmakon "drug" and kinetikos "moving, putting in motion"; see chemical kinetics), sometimes abbreviated as PK, is a branch of pharmacology dedicated to determining the fate of substances administered to a living organism.

The substances of interest include any chemical xenobiotic such as: pharmaceutical drugs, pesticides, food additives, cosmetic ingredients, etc.

It attempts to analyze chemical metabolism and to discover the fate of a chemical from the moment that it is administered up to the point at which it is completely eliminated from the body.

Pharmacokinetics is the study of how an organism affects a drug, whereas pharmacodynamics is the study of how the drug affects the organism.

Both together influence dosing, benefit, and adverse effects, as seen in PK/PD models.

A health professional, health practitioner or healthcare provider (sometimes simply "provider") is an individual who provides preventive, curative, promotional or rehabilitative health care services in a systematic way to people, families or communities.

A clinical decision support system (CDSS) is a health information technology system that is designed to provide physicians and other health professionals with clinical decision support (CDS), that is, assistance with clinical decision-making tasks.

A working definition has been proposed by Robert Hayward of the Centre for Health Evidence: "Clinical Decision Support systems link health observations with health knowledge to influence health choices by clinicians for improved health care".

CDSSs constitute a major topic in artificial intelligence in medicine.

In economics, utility is a measure of preferences over some set of goods (including services: something that satisfies human wants); it represents satisfaction experienced by the consumer of a good.

The concept is an important underpinning of rational choice theory in economics and game theory: since one cannot directly measure benefit, satisfaction or happiness from a good or service, economists instead have devised ways of representing and measuring utility in terms of measurable economic choices.

Economists have attempted to perfect highly abstract methods of comparing utilities by observing and calculating economic choices; in the simplest sense, economists consider utility to be revealed in people's willingness to pay different amounts for different goods.