Structured Information Displays for the Comparison of Clinical Trials

At the point of patient care, clinicians have many unanswered questions that if unanswered could potentially compromise care quality. Major barriers of pursuing these questions include lack of time, doubt that an answer exists, and an effort to benefit calculation. PubMed® contains answers to most questions, however, the answers are often in the form of a list of "study-centered" abstracts that often do not match clinicians' patient-centered mental models. The aim of this study is to investigate RCTComp, a novel prototype of patient-centered, structured and graphical displays that is based on the well-known format of a PICO information display (Population, Intervention, Comparison, and Outcome). A PICO display was hypothesized to help physicians synthesize and compare evidence from multiple clinical trials found in PubMed® because of the familiarity with the model.