An assistant professor of medicine at the Duke University Medical Center since 2007, Dr. Daniella Zipkin supervises medical residents with an emphasis on evidence-based medicine (EBM), which implements the latest in external clinical research. In 2012, she co-authored the paper “Evidence-Based Medicine and Primary Care: Keeping Up Is Hard to Do” (Mount Sinai Journal of Medicine, 79:545–554). In this paper, Dr. Daniella Zipkin and her colleagues examine barriers to providing efficient, evidence-based medical care.
The need for EBM training is based on a study of primary care physicians (PCP) that indicated that those PCPs unfamiliar with evidence-based Joint National Commission guidelines were more likely to utilize medications beyond the thresholds recommended by the commission. Similarly, lack of EBM guidelines training and awareness correlated with use of non-evidence-based first line drugs. Dr. Zipkin writes that EBM has gained heightened visibility in the past two decades and notes that this practice will soon offer patients more than an assurance of excellence in care. A particularly significant development involves its becoming linked to incentives and reimbursement under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010.
The need for EBM training is based on a study of primary care physicians (PCP) that indicated that those PCPs unfamiliar with evidence-based Joint National Commission guidelines were more likely to utilize medications beyond the thresholds recommended by the commission. Similarly, lack of EBM guidelines training and awareness correlated with use of non-evidence-based first line drugs. Dr. Zipkin writes that EBM has gained heightened visibility in the past two decades and notes that this practice will soon offer patients more than an assurance of excellence in care. A particularly significant development involves its becoming linked to incentives and reimbursement under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010.