I'm trying to sort out Critically Appraised Topics and Patient
Oriented Evidence that Matters (POEMS). The CATS site at CEBM looks
relatively unvisited and I think the CAT-bank has disappeared. I think
POEMs disappeared some time ago from BMJ.
Both CATS and POEMS were supposed to address a clinical question (in
which case both would either evoke either a systematic review or
several high quality primary publications) but in fact both seem to
have been used to critically evaluate a single publication, the
'question' being generated retrospectively from the journal article
(which is a different exercise altogether). Were CATS originally
question-initiated and POEMS publication-initiated? Are CATS dead?
I use a POEM/PICOT format for teaching residents to critically
evaluate the literature.
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