Health professionals can now get on-the-spot access to expert opinion, guidelines and the latest evidence with the launch of Best Practice, from the internationally renowned BMJ Evidence Centre.

Best Practice is a new on-line decision support tool designed to help practitioners, patients, students and researchers find the best medical information and use it in the most effective way.

It brings together the latest evidence, peer-reviewed expert opinion, and guidelines on over 10,000 different diagnoses. Its easy-to-use design fits information around existing workflows - enabling clinicians, nurses and pharmacists to make the best decisions for their patients, every time.

Built specifically for point-of-care use, it will help meet the real, diverse and evolving information challenges that health professionals face every day.

Best Practice also features seamless integration with drug formularies (BNF and Martindale), patient information, the potential for links to electronic health records and the ability to add local guidelines and links. But, unlike existing online textbooks, Best Practice re-shapes this complex information into bite-size chunks that are more easily navigated – crucial when applying evidence effectively in pressurised healthcare environments.

Key features include:
• All content written and peer reviewed by internationally renown specialists
• Coverage of 10,000 diagnoses in 2009
• Information structured around the patient consultation
• Advice on symptom evaluation, test ordering and treatment strategies
• Critical prescribing information, guideline summaries and expert opinion
• 192 patient support leaflets

“Time is a key challenge to delivering evidence-based health care,” says Dr Charles Young, Best Practice Editor in Chief. “For a busy clinician, finding reliable information to answer important clinical questions is usually difficult, and always time consuming.

Best Practice meets this challenge head on. It provides clinicians with trustworthy information, anticipates their questions and delivers quick answers - essential in the short time they have to make diagnosis or treatment decisions, and to explain them to their patients. Essentially, it provides a reliable second opinion in an instant.”

Dr Hamish Meldrum, Chairman of Council at the British Medical Association said: “I welcome this important advance in point-of-care decision support from the BMJ Group. Doctors are keen to ensure that their work is linked as firmly as possible to the latest and most reliable evidence. Best Practice allows them to do this in an instant, without the need for checking multiple resources, making it easier for clinicians and patients to make informed treatment decisions together.”

Best Practice is at: http://bestpractice.bmj.com/