From medical journals to the daily news, healthcare providers and patients are bombarded by information. Healthcare professionals must accept and feel comfortable with the fact that there is absolutely no way that they can keep pace with the information explosion.

So, healthcare practitioners must develop effective ways of identifying, filtering, evaluating, using and, most importantly, applying new information to enhance patient care. According to the principles of Information Mastery, we should assess the usefulness of information first by determining its relevance as there is no point reading about an intervention unless it:

• is FEASIBLE locally,
• shows that patients can live longer or better – i.e. the OUTCOMES* studied matter,
• would lead to a CHANGE in your practice, and
• looks at a condition that is COMMON in your practice.

If the information is relevant in these ways, then, and only then, does the research need to be critically appraised for validity. This is a difficult skill to learn and practice, so wherever possible most health care practitioners should rely on digests of evidence where the critical appraisal has already been done by a trusted source.

Above all, busy health care practitioners need to stop trying to stay up to date by reading, and instead use a strategy (and/or tools) to search quickly to find the best answer (not just any answer) to the clinical problems they face. The evaluation of information can be expressed as a formula:

Usefulness = Relevance x Validity
                    Time and Effort Required