Putting Guidelines in the Hands of Patients: A Heuristic Evaluation of a Consumer Mobile Application.

Preventive clinical practice guidelines are valuable. However, they are often difficult for primary care providers to implement in the time sensitive primary care setting and alternate approaches warrant exploration. An app called CANBeWell was developed in an effort to allow consumers to identify appropriate guidelines for themselves. Two investigators conducted a heuristic evaluation to identify potential eHealth literacy and usability issues. Several recommendations were made to make CANBeWell easier for consumers to use and understand. CANBeWell is a promising app for deploying preventive guidelines directly to health consumers. Usability testing is planned for the next iteration to ensure that this app meets the needs and capabilities of health consumers.

Update on age-appropriate preventive measures and screening for Canadian primary care providers.

OBJECTIVE: To summarize the best available age-appropriate, evidence-based guidelines for prevention and screening in Canadian adults. QUALITY OF EVIDENCE: The Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care recommendations are the primary source of information, supplemented by relevant US Preventive Services Task Force recommendations when a Canadian task force guideline was unavailable or outdated. Leading national disease-specific or specialty-specific organizations' guidelines were also reviewed to ensure the most up-to-date evidence was included. MAIN MESSAGE: Recommended screening maneuvers by age and sex are presented in a summary table highlighting the quality of evidence supporting these recommendations. An example of a template for use with electronic medical records or paper-based charts is presented. CONCLUSION: Whether primary care providers use a dedicated preventive health visit or opportunistic preventive counseling and screening in their patient encounters, this summary of evidence-based recommendations can help maximize efficiency and prevent important omissions and unnecessary screening.

[The periodic health examination: a comparison of United States and Canadian recommendations]. / L'examen médical périodique. Une comparaison des recommandations canadiennes et américaines.

OBJECTIVE: To compare recommendations of the Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care with those of the United States Preventive Services Task Force for periodic health examinations (PHEs), following the usual sequence of a medical interview. QUALITY OF EVIDENCE: Each task force reviewed the literature exhaustively and created a system of classification that indicated the quality of the evidence. MAIN MESSAGE: Two tables sum up the conclusions of the task forces with respect to preventive measures to be included in PHEs: one for adults generally and one for women specifically. Three other tables show measures for which recommendations are different or conflicting, as well as measures that might be excluded. Several forms and other materials for PHEs based on these comparisons can be found at http://medecinefamiliale.com/umf/emc/emp_guide.htm. Many recommendations are similar; in spite of this, many physicians fail to include them in PHEs. Certain factors could explain the differences between the recommendations, including the challenge of arriving at a standard scientific process for reviewing data, the fact that formulating recommendations is a social as well as a scientific process, and the fact that the CTFPHC is seriously underfunded. CONCLUSION: A scientific review of the literature, even when performed by experts using strict criteria, is not easy to standardize. The differences that our comparison revealed, some of which are substantial, highlight the need to further examine how recommendations are formulated. More research in this field would be helpful.