Introduction: Research synthesis in evidence-based clinical decision-making

Abstract

As an introduction to the book, we, the editors, present here a brief overview and discussion of the current status of evidence-based health care. In this first chapter, we describe the central role of systematic reviews (SRs) in the process of clinical decision-making in evidence-based health care. Particular emphasis is given to the correspondence of the four fundamental steps of the logic model: inputs, activities, outputs, and impact, to the process of actualizing and evaluating clinical decision-making and policies in evidence-based decision making for optimizing clinical outcomes. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.