Evidence-Based Health Information: Resources from Cochrane Collaboration and CUE

If you spend any time reading about evidence-based medicine, eventually you are going to hear someone mention a “Cochrane” review. These reviews take a systematic look at the research on a health topic, and try to provide answers to questions about best practices.

The Cochrane Collaboration is the international non-profit organization that produces these reviews and works to spread the findings to health care providers and patients. There’s a helpful newcomers’ guide to introduce people to Cochrane, and the video below provides some history and context for the organization.

The United States Cochrane Center, one of 14 centers around the world, is based at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Maryland. In addition to performing evidence reviews, the USCC also runs Consumers United for Evidence-based Health Care (CUE), a coalition of advocacy groups working to provide consumers with access to evidence-based information about health. Our Bodies Ourselves is a member organization.

CUE offers an online course on understanding evidence-based healthcare topics, such as research design, statistics, and other topics.

The video below offers more explanation, and features Zobeida Bonilla, who works on OBOS’s Latina Health Initiative.

Related: 

Meeting Dispatch: Resources from the CUE/Cochrane/Campbell Colloquium – Links to sources of evidence-based information, critiques of health journalism, info on pharmaceutical company payments to doctors, and more, collected from the 2010 joint meeting of CUE and the Cochrane and Campbell Collaborations.