 Pico is a technique that you can use to formulate and refine your topic questions. In this video, we'll explain Pico and how you can use it to refine your own questions. Pico stands for P, Patient Population or Problem, I, Intervention or Exposure, C, Comparison, and O, Outcome. To use Pico, you have to answer questions about each of these elements. Here's what that looks like. Patient, population, or problem? What are the characteristics of the patient or population? For example, gender, age, or other demographics. What is the situation or disease you're interested in? For example, diabetes management, intervention or exposure. What do you want to do with the patient, person, or population? Treat, diagnose, observe? For example, reaction to a specific type of treatment. Comparison. What is the alternative to the intervention? A placebo, a different drug, or a surgery? For example, how does a sample group that receives a drug compared to a similar group that is given a placebo? And outcome. What are the relevant outcomes? Morbidity, death, complications. For example, how do lower cholesterol numbers impact the target population? Sometimes it can be useful to add a time frame to Pico. When you include the time frame of the topic, this is called Pico T. When you add the time frame as an additional element, you have to ask, over what period of time? So what does this technique look like in practice? Here are a few examples of Pico applying to different types of topics. Let's start with an example question about a therapy. My initial question could be something like, what's the value of hip protectors for people with osteoporosis? That's a little general, so I'll use Pico to refine it. The format of this question could be, in P, do or does I result in O when compared with C over T? Now we can insert some information into the blank spots. For P, the patient population or problem I'm going to look at is nursing home residents with osteoporosis. For I, the intervention or exposure I'm interested in is hip protectors. For O, the outcome I want to know about is fewer injuries from slips, trips, and falls. For C, the comparison I think is relevant is standard osteoporosis drug therapy. Now for T, the timeframe I'm going to look at is the course of the resident's stay. When I add this information into the question, it becomes, in nursing home residents with osteoporosis, do hip protectors result in fewer injuries from slips, trips, and falls when compared with standard osteoporosis drug therapy over the course of their stay? This question is specific and will be more useful when it comes time to search for evidence. Let's look at another example. This time we'll look at a topic for prognosis. My initial question was, what is the relationship between text reminders and forgotten insulin doses? The Pico question format could be, do or does I, performed on P, lead to O over T compared with C? The intervention or exposure is regular text reminders. The patient population or problem is patients recently diagnosed with diabetes. The outcome I want to know about is a lower occurrence of forgotten insulin doses. The timeframe I'll look at is the first six months of treatment, and I'll compare this all against no reminders. My question now becomes, do regular text message reminders performed on patients recently diagnosed with diabetes lead to a lower occurrence of forgotten insulin doses over the first six months of treatment compared with no reminders? This new question narrows my focus to specific information, which again will be useful when I start searching. You can use the Pico techniques for a wide variety of subject areas. Try Pico when you're developing your next search topic. I hope this helps, and thanks for watching.