Essential Evidence Plus offers a number of options for searching the collection of resources included with the program, but fundamentally Essential Evidence Plus features a keyword-driven search.

Essential Evidence Plus is point-of-care tool, and due to the limited computing power of handheld devices, full-text searching of the resources included in Essential Evidence Plus is impractical. As a busy healthcare-professional, waiting more than a few seconds for the results of a search is unacceptable. Therefore, all of Essential Evidence Plus's resources are indexed on appropriate ICD-9 codes, generic and trade drug names, and other common medical terms.

Essential Evidence Plus makes the search process easier, however, by eliminating the need for the health professional to know what keywords are available in order to effectively search for the required information. With Essential Evidence Plus's Search by any word technology, a free text search assists the user in finding the most appropriate keywords for the desired topic.

For detailed search help on a Palm OS or Pocket PC device, please refer to Searching & Browsing: Palm OS & Pocket PC.

For the Web, refer to Searching & Browsing: Web.

For an overview of the different resources included in Essential Evidence Plus, see Searching & Browsing: Databases Searched.

Essential Evidence Plus Search results are organized by clinical content area. On Essential Evidence Plus for PalmOS or PocketPC and Essential Evidence Plus on the Web, this organization is presented as the Refine by type of result options. The following list shows all possible content areas in the order in which they are displayed in search results.

• Overviews and practice guidelines
  • Essential Evidence
  • EBM Guidelines
  • Practice Guidelines
• Treatment
  • General Treatment
  • Drug Treatment
  • Surgery, anesthesia, and procedures
  • Diet, vitamins, exercise, PT, and OT
  • Harm
  • Treatment by Drug (POEMs/Cochrane only)
• Diagnosis
  • Differential diagnosis
  • History and physical test calculators
  • Diagnostic tests
  • Clinical rules and calculators
  • Miscellaneous diagnosis
• Screening and Prevention
  • Screening for disease
  • Prevention (primary)
• Prognosis
  • Prognosis of disease / natural history
  • Follow-up tests and monitoring
• Epidemiology
  • Causation and etiology
  • Incidence and prevalence of disease
  • Risk Factor for disease
• Practice Administration/Health Systems
  • Education
  • Patient education

In addition, each search result is tagged with an icon that represents the resource in which the article was found.

• Essential Evidence
• EBM Guidelines
• Decision Support Calculators
• Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews
• Diagnostic Test Calculators
• History and Physical Test Calculators
• Daily POEMs
• Practice Guidelines
• Patient Education Handouts