Evidence-based medicine and Web 2.0: friend or foe?

摘要

To allow for timely translation of information into clinical practice, evidence-based medicine (EBM) requires mechanisms to retrieve all relevant available data. In addition to databases such as PubMed and other traditional online resources, the tools and technologies built around so-called user-generated content, collectively termed Web 2.0, provide for the efficient spreading and distribution of health information. Data suggest that almost 90% of physicians use Web 2.0 tools in their medical practice while few actually contribute content. About 75% of internet users including patients have looked online for health information in the past. As the easily accessible information available to the healthcare user may strengthen the doctor-patient relationship and empower patients, it may also introduce bias into the practice of EBM (Figure 1). In particular, the nature of social media and the Web 2.0 allows for a quick and completely uncontrolled environment in which information can spread whereby the provenance and trustworthiness of such sources is often not easy to determine.