Lessons from Evidence-Based Medicine: What Healthcare Designers Can Learn from the Medical Field

Abstract

This paper explores the history of evidence-based medicine (EBM) in comparison to the relatively short history of evidence-based design (EBD). Throughout its development, EBM has encountered a number of challenges, including dealing with initial objections to the concept, creating safeguards to ensure rigor in research, supporting practitioners in their efforts to stay current with a growing body of research data, applying the literature to real-life situations, making decisions when literature to inform decision making is absent, and educating students and professionals to become EBM practitioners. The ways in which the field of EBM has handled these challenges provides a number of lessons for the relatively young field of EBD.