| Year: 2003 | 
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| 2003-007 |
| Bringing Evidence to Practice: The Trial Bank System |
| Ida Sim, MD, Ph.D. |
| 2003-03-31 |
| Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are one of the best sources of evidence for the scientific practice of medicine. However, RCT findings are currently published only as text articles that are of limited machine understandability. The Trial Bank system captures information about the design, execution, and summary results of RCTs into a structured electronic knowledge base called RCT Bank. The RCT Bank data model is based on a task analysis of systematic reviewing, the canonical method for interpreting RCTs for clinical application. In collaboration with JAMA and the Annals of Internal Medicine (Annals), RCTs published by these journals are now co-published in RCT Bank. By capturing all the information needed for rigorous trial critiquing and interpretation, RCT Bank serves as a shared machine-understandable repository of RCTs for computer-based reasoning in evidence-based medicine. The long-term objective of this work is to catalyze the worldwide publication of RCTs into interoperating trial banks that are specifically designed to support the computer-assisted application of RCTs to clinical care. |
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