Center for Information Mastery

Information Mastery is the application of the principles of evidence-based medicine concepts and techniques to the day-to-day practice of medical care. The concepts were developed in the early 1990s by Allen F. Shaughnessy, PharmD, MMedEd of Tufts University and David Slawson, MD of the University of Virginia.

There are two main principles of Information Mastery. The first principle is that some information sources are more useful to practicing clinicians than other information sources. Conceptually, the usefulness of any information source depends on the relevance of the information in the source, the validity of this information, and the time, effort, and money required to access the information. These three characteristics can be related in this way:

Usefulness = (Relevance x Validity) / Work