Clinical workstations supporting evidence-based medicine.

The application of the principles of evidence-based medicine is based on a rigorous analysis of clinical research tailored to the individual characteristics of a specific patient. Thus the physician must have information about the patient and about the latest results of clinical research simultaneously. We present a computer-based clinical workstation offering sources for both kinds of information: the current patient data is delivered by access to the electronic patient record and the results of research may be searched at the Internet, Intranet, or other online databases. Performing an evaluation study we are testing this configuration in the setting of a university hospital. The physicians are interviewed about their use of the single information sources and their consequences for clinical research and evidence-based medicine. We hope to show that in spite of some technical and methodological problems the clinical workstation is a promising tool for decision-making at the clinical workplace.