Enhancing Database Search Effectiveness- Transforming Clinical Inquiries into PICO(T) Questions
Enhancing Database Search Effectiveness- Transforming Clinical Inquiries into PICO(T) Questions
Chronic illnesses remain a global health concern. As the global prevalence of various chronic diseases increases, healthcare systems worldwide are staring at public health catastrophes likely to affect both developed and developing countries (Maresova et al., 2019). This highlights the need to ramp up efforts to manage these illnesses. Chronic care encompasses all patient-centered approaches provided for patients with chronic illnesses (Boehmer et al., 2018). Even with sophistication in healthcare and the introduction of novel approaches to managing these disorders, managing chronic diseases is still a challenge. Technological revolutions in modern healthcare are, perhaps, the game changers in the pursuit of effective and efficient management of chronic disorders (Fan & Zhao, 2022). This paper theorizes the need for integrating health information technologies into chronic care.
The research process seeking to explore the need to integrate health information technologies into chronic care will use a PICOT-formated question. The PICOT formatted question utilized in this respect is: In _patients with chronic illnesses_ what is the effect of _integrating health information technologies_ as compared to __traditional hospital visitations_on _the number of hospital revisitations__within the first year of management? A search into reputable databases on chronic care and the integration of health information technologies into chronic care yielded thousands of articles. By refining this search process using the PICOT formatted question as a guide, the number of articles located was reduced to 564. Several strategies can be utilized to increase the effectiveness of the search process. The first strategy is breaking the PICOT question into keywords and ideas. These will form the search terms. For instance, when searching the database for the defined clinical problem, the search terms that I used include “chronic care,” “health information technology,” and “the integration of HIT into chronic care.” Other strategies include adding boolean operators, using synonyms, and adding quotation marks to the search terms.
References
Boehmer, K. R., Abu Dabrh, A. M., Gionfriddo, M. R., Erwin, P., & Montori, V. M. (2018). Does the chronic care model meet the emerging needs of people living with multimorbidity? A systematic review and thematic synthesis. PLOS ONE, 13(2). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0190852
Fan, K., & Zhao, Y. (2022). Mobile Health Technology: A novel tool in chronic disease management. Intelligent Medicine, 2(1), 41–47. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.imed.2021.06.003
Maresova, P., Javanmardi, E., Barakovic, S., Barakovic Husic, J., Tomsone, S., Krejcar, O., & Kuca, K. (2019). Consequences of chronic diseases and other limitations associated with old age – a scoping review. BMC Public Health, 19(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-019-7762-5