The incorporation of evidence-based medicine (EBM) and healthcare into training and clinical practice has grown steadily since it was first proposed as “a new approach to teaching the practice of medicine” by the EBM Working Group in a 1992 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association.  Most medical schools now include some formal instruction in evidence-based medicine in their curricula, although the design and implementation of instructional and learning activities vary from institution to institution.  More recently there is growing interest and efforts to extend and adapt the principles and approach of EBM to Evidence-based Medical Education (EBME) in hopes of improving medical education.  

Evidence-based Medical Education may be thought of as integrating the best evidence regarding instructional design, learning, motivation, remembering, transfer of learning, and other educational issues with our own experience and expertise, as well as with learners’ needs and expectations.  Efforts are underway to apply the five-step EBM process to EBME.  These steps are to 1) frame an educationally relevant question that clearly states the problem, population, intervention, comparison to be made, and outcome, 2) identify research evidence that pertains to this question, 3) critically appraise this evidence for strengths, weakness, and applicability, 4) incorporate this evidence into an educational decision and apply it by integrating this appraisal with your experience and learner characteristics and needs, and then 5) evaluate how well it works in practice.  Organized and structured evidence-based efforts are underway by such international organizations as the Cochrane Collaboration, the Campbell Collaboration, and the Best Evidence Medical Education (BEME) Collaboration, each of which provides some potentially useful resources for educators.  For example, even though the Cochrane Collaboration does not directly address best practices in undergraduate medical education, a current search of the Cochrane Library, which is updated quarterly on CD-ROM and on the World Wide Web, using the search term “education” identified over 9000 possible primary studies in its Central Register of Controlled Trials database, over 300 systematic reviews of the research literature done by members of the Cochrane Collaboration, and over 300 more systematic reviews done by others and published in the literature. 

These growing efforts in EBME beg a number of important questions.  For example, what constitutes good (or adequate) evidence in medical education?  What can we do to improve and organize our knowledge and evidence base?  How can we best use evidence in educational decision-making?  When and how is it appropriate to use evidence for program development?  The potential educational implications and applications of EBME in teaching in the basic sciences are largely unexplored to date, and can be thought of in at least two ways.  The first deals with teaching scientifically proven or “evidence-based” content in each of the basic science disciplines, while the second centers on identifying and using the “best” proven instructional methods for teaching that particular content.