POEM stands for "Patient Oriented Evidence that Matters", and refers to the kind of article that:
DOE stands for "Disease-Oriented Evidence".
DOEs are all too common in the medical literature. This kind of evidence is often misleading and generally should be considered premature.
For example, early studies of the drug finasteride showed promise, based on the effect on the urinary flow rate. Many patients were put on the drug, at great cost. However, further randomized trials showed that symptom scores did not improve any more than placebo. What do your patients care about - whether their urinary flow rate improved, or whether they are sleeping through the night?
When POEMs exist, forget the DOEs."
Info POEMS on the internet is the premier site for these, they produce an excellent piece of software, a free demo of which you can download by following the link above.
Medical reference that includes a variety of resources. Our focus is on providing you with the best available evidence, and all information in InfoRetriever is tagged with a level of evidence. Each item in InfoRetriever is fully indexed, making your searches fast and efficient. We provide multiple ways to search, and update the information every 4 months.
InfoRetriever is designed to quickly help you find the best available evidence on a topic. Because there is not good evidence for many of the things we do in medicine (yet!), we have included the over 1000 general topics from Griffith’s 5 Minute Clinical Consult in InfoRetriever. These overviews are the perfect complement to the best available evidence provided in InfoRetriever.
InfoRetriever 2003 includes the following resources:
InfoPOEMs (Over 1800 brief critical appraisals of the most important primary care literature, adding about 350 per year)
Griffith’s 5 Minute Clinical Consult (1029 brief summaries of symptoms and diagnoses)
The Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews (over 1350 abstracts)
Clinical rules and calculators (120 useful clinical rules and calculators like the Ottawa Ankle Rules, Strep Score, several pre-op evaluation rules, ABG interpretation, and much more). We also include clinical rules that operationalize the ATP III lipid guidleines and JNC VI hypertension guidlines for quick use at the point of care.
An ICD9 "look-up" facility
A photo atlas with over 500 medical photos
Drug information (over 1200 drugs, including the United Healthcare formulary, basic prescribing, and pregnancy/lactation data. Warnings and drug interactions are NOT included)
Family Practice Inquiries Network (a growing list of clinical questions and their answers based on the best available evidence)
Indexed links to over 500 patient education handouts on the Web
Web-based guidelines (direct links to about 150 evidence-based guidelines; requires Internet connection and Web browser)
Treatment guidelines (brief summaries of over 250 selected evidence-based guidelines)
Diagnostic test and history and physical exam information (information about test accuracy, in a handy calculator, for over 1000 unique combinations of symptom, diagnosis, and test)
When less is more: a practical approach to searching for evidence-based answers
POEMS are now published each week in the BMJ