ICML Conference 2009: Keynote Speaker

Professor Paul Glasziou

Director, Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine
Department of Primary Health Care
University of Oxford

Biography:

Professor Paul P Glasziou is currently the Director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine, and Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine in the department of Primary Care at the University of Oxford, and also continues work as a part-time General Practitioner in a central Oxford group practice. The Bulletin magazine named him as one of Australia's '10 smartest people' in health care. In 2003 he moved to the University of Oxford to direct the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine. He has been the editor of the BMJ's journal of Evidence-Based Medicine since 1998, a member of the BMJ's first editorial board, Chair of the UK Health Technology Assessment (HTA) program's Diagnostics Panel and a member of the UK HTA Priority Settings Group, a member of WHO's Guidelines Review Committee, chair of several Cochrane working groups, and a former member of the Australian NHMRC's Health Advisory Committee, and the National Institute of Clinical Studies (NICS) Board of Directors. He is the author of six books related to evidence based practice.

Presentation: Evidence-Based Medicine - is it working?

There is a considerable gap between what is known from research and what is done in practice. Part of the problem is not knowing and part is not doing. The "not knowing" arises from our information overload, e.g., over 1,500 studies and 55 randomised trials - are added to MEDLINE each day. The "not doing" can be broken down into several steps between valid research publishing and improved patients outcomes: awareness, acceptance, applicability, availability and ability, remembering at the appropriate time, getting patient agreement, and finally adherence to agreed treatments. At each step there is some "leakage". Addressing these leakages to navigating and using best (evidence-based) practice needs a multifaceted "solution". This will require sophisticated computerised evidence delivery systems at the point of care. However, to fuel these systems we need better (and continually updated) guidelines, syntheses, and systematic reviews of evidence. The "not doing" gap arise because of the limits of human memory, which we need to acknowledge.