PICO is a popular framework for formulating clinical questions, especially those relating to therapy (or intervention) effectiveness. It’s used to develop a well-built clinical question to aid in creating a search strategy. It helps identify searchable aspects of a situation in which a patient or population has a certain condition, and the outcome of interest is related to a therapy or intervention.
PICO stands for:
Example:
For this scenario, we can build our PICO question like this:
P- premature infants in the NICU
I- music therapy
C- no comparison (null comparison)
O- Improvement in physiological and behavioral responses
Using PICO, we can formulate a focused, answerable question:
Brown, D. (2020). A Review of the PubMed PICO Tool: Using Evidence-Based Practice in Health Education. Health Promotion Practice, 21(4), 496–498.
Checklist from From Roy E, Brown, Virginia Commonwealth University. This checklist is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).