Reexamining the Evidence Behind Evidence-Based Medicine, Part 1

Evidence-based medicine has benefited patients in countless ways, but there’s a disconnect between EBM and the clinical care that is typically delivered at the bedside. Pragmatic, real-world trials and AI-based algorithms may help solve the problem.

By Paul Cerrato, MA, senior research analyst and communications specialist, Mayo Clinic Platform, and John Halamka, M.D., Diercks President, Mayo Clinic Platform

Since its introduction in the 1990s, evidence-based medicine (EBM) has transformed patient care and removed much of the guess work and unsubstantiated opinions from the practice of medicine. The original definition of EBM is the “de-emphasized intuition, unsystematic clinical experience, and pathophysiological rationale as sufficient grounds for clinical decision making and stresses the examination of evidence from clinical research.”¹ Since...