What is EBMeDS?

The Evidence-Based Medicine electronic Decision Support (EBMeDS) system brings evidence into practice by means of context-sensitive guidance at the point of care.

EBMeDS receives structured patient data from electronic patient records (EPRs) and returns reminders, therapeutic suggestions and diagnosis-specific links to guidelines. It can also be used to canalize patient data to electronic forms and calculators. In addition to real-time use, the EBMeDS decision support rules can also be run in patient populations ("virtual health checks").

EBMeDS is a platform-independent service, which can be integrated into in any EPR containing structured patient data. It is based on a simple but efficient technology, and both installing and updating the system is easy.

EBMeDS is developed by Duodecim Medical Publications Ltd, a Finnish company owned by the Finnish Medical Society Duodecim. Both the association and the company have a long-standing collaborative relationship with the Cochrane Collaboration, the GRADE Working Group, the Guidelines International Network (G-I-N) and the publishing company Wiley-Blackwell.

All end-users of the EBMeDS service can contribute to the development of new scripts. The simplest way of contribution is to send a suggestion of a script idea to the EBMeDS editorial team. End-users are also offered free access to the EBMeDS Script Description Editor (ESDE), a web-based editing tool for collaboratory development of evidence-based decision support rules. The use of ESDE requires registration.

The process for creating the EBMeDS clinical decision support content is the first in the world to receive NHS accreditation. Read more about the accreditation.