The PEDro team presented a paper evaluating the impact of “Evidence in your inbox” at the 13th International Society of Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine World Congress in Kobe, Japan in June 2019. The abstract for the paper is below. If you are interested in subscribing to “Evidence in your inbox” please visit the PEDro web-site.

BACKGROUND AND AIMS: Clinicians subscribe to journals, visit medical libraries or sign up for alerts to keep up-to-date with research. However, due to the large number of journals, these options are insufficient to keep abreast of all relevant and important research. Clinicians also waste precious time finding the best and most applicable research because alerts are not filtered. The Physiotherapy Evidence Database (PEDro) indexes all trials, reviews and guidelines evaluating physiotherapy interventions, and now produces “Evidence in your inbox.” This free monthly service overcomes the issue of scatter because of the exhaustive processes used to identify articles. The issue of filtering is addressed by separating the articles into practice areas and ranking the articles by method and quality. The aim of this study is to describe size, subscription and engagement rates for PEDro’s “Evidence in your inbox.”

METHODS: Data were extracted from 45 monthly feeds (October 2015 to June 2019) for 15 areas of practice (eg, cardiothoracics, gerontology, neurology). The size of each feed was recorded plus subscription and engagement (open rate and click rate) were downloaded from MailChimp.

RESULTS: The number of articles per feed ranged from 2 (whiplash) to 54 (musculoskeletal). There were 12,697 subscribers (musculoskeletal had the largest number (n=9,453) and cerebral palsy the smallest (n=1,227)), with rates growing steadily over time. Open rates are consistently 15-25%, with cerebral palsy having the highest (29%) and oncology the lowest (16%). The rate of clicking on one or more links within a feed is about 5%, being highest for musculoskeletal (8%) and lowest for oncology (2%).

CONCLUSIONS: “Evidence in your inbox” is a valuable resource for busy clinicians. Users could increase their engagement by subscribing to a single feed and getting into the routine of reading articles. PEDro could develop the resource by testing strategies to increase engagement.