REHAB+

About This Site


REHAB+ is a service made available by the Canadian MSK Rehab Research Network in collaboration with the DeGroote School of Medicine's Department of Health Research Methods, Evidence & Impact Health Information Research Unit. It incorporates the McMasterPLUSTM email alerting system and searchable database of best evidence from the health care literature of particular interest to rehabilitation professionals. It is supported in part by a grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

Users of REHAB+ with interests in a specific clinical problem or treatment are invited to use Search to look up topics covered in the McMasterPLUSTM database starting from mid-2007.

Occupational and physical therapists are invited to register their interests so that they can receive email alerts and searching access for literature that is matched to their personal clinical interests.




What are the features of REHAB+?

The current features of REHAB+ include:

  • ratings of each eligible article for clinical relevance and newsworthiness by at least 3 practitioners for each discipline for which the article might be pertinent
  • e-mail alerts about new evidence. Each alert includes MORE clinical ratings and comments, and electronic links to the article's abstract via PubMed (if available) and fulltext article via PubMed or the publisher's site (if available for free)
  • a cumulative searchable database of the alerts that is continuously updated (from mid-2007 forward)
  • a search interface to access relevant information in the accumulating database
  • evidence-based search strategies for MEDLINE to supplement searches in the cumulated PLUS database when needed
  • download options for citation management
  • links to evidence-based resources



What do the clinical ratings in REHAB+ mean?

The current features of PLUS include:

  • systematic review of over 120 journals (including all Cochrane reviews relevant to rehabilitation) with selection of articles by expert research staff concerning the cause, course, diagnosis, prediction, prevention, and treatment of rehabilitation problems, quality improvement and health economics, according to explicit criteria, with high reproducibility and periodic quality assurance checks*
  • ratings of each eligible article for clinical relevance and newsworthiness by at least 3 practitioners for each discipline for which the article might be pertinent

* Wilczynski NL, McKibbon KA, Haynes RB. Enhancing retrieval of best evidence for health care from bibliographic databases: calibration of the hand search of the literature. Medinfo. 2001;10(Pt 1):390-3.