Treatment decisions should be based upon reliable evidence from randomised trials. To achieve this all trials are first registered and then the results are reported. This has been the main focus of EbM in recent years. Much progress has been made on prospective registration. The case has been made for making the results available at the end of a trial, but much more work is still required to make this work in practice. Any solution needs to be considered in terms of its impact on the whole trial ecosystem, rather than whether it just promotes some vague concept like “data sharing.”
The real paradox in medicine is the simple fact that at the same time that there has been increasing recognition of the need for reliable evidence from randomised trials it has also become much more difficult and costly to do trials. EbM is now increasingly turning its attention to removing these barriers to doing randomised trials in order to make it much easier to do trials.
Here is an example of this.
The German Network for Evidence-based Medicine was founded in 2000 and now has over 850 members. You can read its news item supporting MoreTrials here. It is a member of the Association of the Scientific Medical Societies in Germany (AWMF), which was an early and proactive supporter of MoreTrials.
I am very much looking forward to speaking to the AWMF at their meeting in November and it is great to see the growing support for MoreTrials throughout Germany.
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