THE ROLE OF EVIDENCE-BASED MEDICINE IN CLINICAL PRACTICE POLICY

Evidence-based medicine has had an important impact on the changing landscape of health care and policy in the United States. The principles of evidence-based medicine continue to grow within the field of orthopaedics as a means of decreasing variation in orthopaedic health-care delivery and improving patient outcomes. The quality of orthopaedic research is continuing to improve, with increasing levels of research quality. Orthopaedic surgeons have an important opportunity to develop and direct the implementation of evidence-based principles into clinical practice and national health policy.