PICO process
Medical mnemonic for framing questions / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is about the medical technique. For pico processes in Microsoft Windows, see Windows Subsystem for Linux § Development.
For other uses, see Pico.
The PICO process (or framework) is a mnemonic used in evidence-based practice (and specifically evidence-based medicine) to frame and answer a clinical or health care related question,[1] though it is also argued that PICO "can be used universally for every scientific endeavour in any discipline with all study designs".[2] The PICO framework is also used to develop literature search strategies, for instance in systematic reviews.[3]
The PICO acronym has come to stand for:[4][5]
- P – Patient, problem or population
- I – Intervention
- C – Comparison, control or comparator[6]
- O – Outcome(s) (e.g. pain, fatigue, nausea, infections, death)
An application that covers clinical questions about interventions, as well as exposures, risk/ prognostic factors, and test accuracy, is:[7][8]
- P – Patient, problem or population
- I – Investigated condition (e.g. intervention, exposure, risk/ prognostic factor, or test result)
- C – Comparison condition (e.g. intervention, exposure, risk/ prognostic factor, or test result respectively)
- O – Outcome(s) (e.g. symptom, syndrome, or disease of interest)
Alternatives such as SPICE and PECO (among many others) can also be used. Some authors suggest adding T and S, as follows:
- T - Timing (e.g. duration of intervention, or date of publication)
- S - Study type (e.g. randomized controlled trial, cohort study, etc.)