What is a POEM?
POEMs are designed to be relevant and must:
• Address a clinical question faced by health care professionals
• Measure outcomes that are important to clinicians and patients,
such as symptoms, morbidity, quality of life and mortality
• Have the potential to change practice
Only original research and systematic reviews are used to produce
POEMs. Preliminary results or evaluations reporting on intermediate
or surrogate outcomes are not usually reviewed.
POEMs must also be valid. For example, studies of treatments must
be randomised controlled trials. For reviews, only systematic reviews,
including meta-analyses, are considered. |
This week, The Journal publishes
its first POEM — a short
synopsis of research that has been identified as being valid and of significance
to patients (see right).
POEM stands for Patient-Oriented Evidence that Matters, a concept originally
thought up by David Slawson, professor of family medicine at the University
of Virginia in Charlottesville, and Allen Shaughnessy, a pharmacist and
adjunct professor of family and community medicine at the Penn State
College of Medicine, Hershey, Pennsylvania. Pharmacists may already have
come across POEMs, either because they have access to the database of
research summaries produced by the company behind POEMs or because they
have seen them published in the BMJ.
The idea of POEMs was born out of a need for useful information. The
most useful of useful information must be relevant to everyday practice,
it must be correct and it should be easily obtained. Professor Slawson
and Professor Shaughnessy came up with a neat equation to describe this:
Usefulness = (relevance x validity) /
work to access
The formula reveals that the best source of information provides highly
relevant and valid information with minimal effort required to obtain
it.
Pharmacists need access to valid, relevant information |
It is important that pharmacists are familiar with the latest research
in therapeutics. They should also be aware of the level of evidence that
backs up trial conclusions. However, pharmacists, like other health care
professionals, are busy people experiencing information overload. Extracting
meaningful information relevant to the treatment of patients is not always
easy.
POEMs are designed to address the problem of information overload. Each
month, a group of editors reviews over 100 journals looking for valid
pieces of research. Articles that meet the POEM criteria for validity
and relevance (see Panel) are summarised. These summaries, in turn, are
reviewed and revised. Each POEM is then allocated a “level of evidence” indicator,
based on codes used by the Oxford
Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine.
Although POEMs were originally designed to help doctors working in primary
care, The Journal believes that some will be useful to pharmacists. InfoPOEMs,
the commercial enterprise behind POEMs, agrees. InfoPOEMS has access
to a range of journals beyond the reach of PJ staff and is allowing us
to publish up to four POEMs a month.
Pharmacists interested in subscribing to the full POEM service should
access the InfoPOEMs website (www.infopoems.com). |
The Pharmaceutical Journal