Developing and Using a Rubric for Evaluating Evidence-Based Medicine Point-Of-Care Tools (Report‪)‬

INTRODUCTION Health care providers require quick retrieval of information to efficiently answer questions related to patient care [1]. Evidence-based medicine (EBM) tools, designed for use at the point of care (POC), meet these needs by providing high-quality and synthesized information at the patients' "bedside" [2]. To support clinical information needs, medical and hospital libraries may wish to subscribe to multiple POC tools, owing to the variety in topics covered, the options provided, and the audiences targeted by each tool. To avoid redundancy and to offer the best products for their users, libraries need to periodically reassess available EBM POC resources [2]. What criteria should librarians utilize to evaluate these POC tools? Because these resources are used to make clinical decisions, resources providing the best evidence relevant to patient care would be most desirable. Those who use these tools "need to know how much confidence they can place in the recommendations" [3]. One role of medical librarians is to evaluate the quality of EBM resources so that users can have confidence in the information upon which they base clinical decisions. This is a weighty responsibility, and librarians have an important challenge determining which EBM POC resources to make available to users.