EmergencyCare+

EmergencyCare+

About This Site


Emergency Care PLUS (Premium LiteratUre Service) is sponsored by the Emergency Strategic Clinical NetworkTM at Alberta Health Services partnering with the University of Alberta Department of Emergency Medicine and University of Calgary, and powered by the Health Information Research Unit, McMaster University, building on the McMaster Premium Literature Service, McMasterPLUSTM

EmergencyCare+ is a continuously updated repository of current best evidence from research to support evidence-based clinical decisions. EmergencyCare+ does not cover basic science.

Our goal is to identify and disseminate studies that are worthy of clinical attention by virtue of their scientific merit and clinical relevance. To do this, we screen and review all articles from 125 premier clinical journals, including American Journal of Emergency Medicine, Annals of Emergency Medicine, Emergency Medical Journal, Journal of Emergency Nursing, and Prehospital Emergency Care . Our research staff and clinical editors assess articles for their methodologic quality, index qualified articles to content related to emergency care, and then at least 3 practitioners from each pertinent clinical discipline assess the qualifying articles for clinical relevance and newsworthiness. Only the strongest studies and systematic reviews are selected for EmergencyCare+; less than 1 in 10 articles published in the field of emergency care makes the grade.



What are the features of EmergencyCare+?

The current features of EmergencyCare+ include:

  • selection of articles by expert research staff and front-line clinicians concerning the cause, course, diagnosis, prediction, prevention, treatment, quality improvement and health economics of managing emergency care problems
  • e-mail alerts about newly published evidence. Each alert includes McMaster Online Rating of Evidence (MORETM) clinical ratings and comments, and electronic links to the article's abstract via PubMed and fulltext article via PubMed or the publisher's site (if available for free; otherwise access is provided to the publisher's website)
  • a cumulative searchable database of articles that is continuously updated (from mid-2003 forward)
  • evidence-based search strategies for MEDLINE (Clinical Queries) 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 EmergencyCare+ mean?

The current features of PLUS include:

  • Systematic review of 125 journals (including all Cochrane reviews) with selection of articles by expert research staff concerning the cause, course, diagnosis, prediction, prevention, treatment, quality improvement and health economics of health problems 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.