Conference Home

Nancy Bergstrom, PhD, RN, FAAN Marcelline Harris, RN, PhD

Dear Colleagues,

Despite the demand for reliable and trustworthy evidence to inform and shape clinical practice, many are frustrated by the slow pace of discovery and replication; clinicians are challenged to adopt practices that often are based on somewhat limited evidence. While rigorous research designs such as the randomized controlled trial (RCT) remain the standard for evidence, why aren’t we also able to learn from day-to-day clinical practice?

The Council for the Advancement of Nursing Science invites you to attend Practice-Based Evidence: Another Side of the Knowledge Development Coin, on October 24, 2007. This conference will provide a forum for describing practice-based evidence as a complementary paradigm to generate knowledge for practice. This paradigm may expand the knowledge base that underlies practice, and facilitate a more seamless approach to evaluate our processes of care and associated performance based measures. Two approaches to development and use of practice-based evidence will be considered. In the first, software and processes designed to facilitate data capture and use by clinicians in the course of clinical care enable the building of analytic databases that are highly specific. In the second, more general software and processes that leverage data captured in electronic medical records are explored. Such electronically available data may help us shift from a dependence on clinical trials to discoveries derived from large scale, well-controlled clinical observations. These newly available data may change scientific approaches, lead to new discoveries, confirm results of trials, make replication possible without additional expensive and time consuming trials, and ultimately may be applied more readily to naturalistic settings.

These are exciting possibilities. Please join us as we consider new ways to think about knowledge development for clinical practice and outcome evaluation.

Sincerely,