Has the #Covid19 pandemic been the death of Evidence Based Medicine?

Coda Educate: Conversation 3

Has the #Covid19 Pandemic been the death of evidence based medicine or the birth of evidence based agility?

We can have all the evidence in the world, but at the heart of everything we do there is ‘us’. The pandemic has seen an incredibly accelerated understanding of COVID-19, a virus none of us had heard of before January 2020, but it has seen a change in how Evidenced Based Medicine (EBM) is processed and presented.

The ‘E’ continues to represent ‘Evidence’ but the ‘B’ has become ‘Belief’ and the ‘M’ is now ‘Media’. Under the pressure of the pandemic we in healthcare have believed there is a need to act on levels of evidence that pre-COVID we would have thought irrational.

So, we must adapt our traditional model of EBM and make it more adaptive to become “EBA” or Evidenced Based Agility. We need to have the ability to rapidly filter out the good quality evidence. Moreover, to find ways to translate that into practice.

However, we must also be agile. If we find that the evidence has changed we need to be able to admit we were wrong. This has not been a feature of EBM in the past where there has been a lot of inertia.

Has the #Covid19 Pandemic been the death of evidence based medicine or the birth of evidence based agility?

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