The first step in evidence based research is learning how to ask
an answerable clinical question.
A helpful technique to use to assemble this question is to employ the PICO mnemonic.
| P: Patient, Problem, Population |
Sex, age, race? Primary complaint? Disease History? |
| I: Intervention or Therapy |
What do you want to do for your patient? Prescribe a drug? Order a test? |
| C: Comparison, Control |
What alternatives do you want to compare the intervention to? |
| O: Outcome |
What do you hope to accomplish, improve or affect? Relieve or reduce symptoms? Improve function or improve test scores? |
PICO helps form a focused question that will return relevant results, it helps you retrieve a manageable number of results, and it can assist in brainstorming keywords for your research. Using PICO to construct a well-built clinical question can lead directly to a well-built search strategy. It is not necessary to use all the information in PICO in your search strategy; you may wish to leave out terms to achieve results that are more broad.