Elsevier Enhances MD Consult, Providing Physicians Faster Access to Crucial Information for Clinical Decision Support

Elsevier, a leading publisher of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, has enhanced MD Consult, its online clinical reference tool, to accelerate access to information and educational content for better diagnosis and treatment. Search results for the most common queries are tailored to each stage of the diagnostic and clinical workup, starting with assessing a patient’s signs and symptoms, then moving on to diagnosis, treatment, potential complications, and prognosis.

“Clinicians want fast, concise answers at the point of care, and they want to have access to the most important information about a medical condition from high-quality trusted resources,” says Dr. Jonathan Teich, an attending physician in emergency medicine at Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Chief Medical Informatics Officer at Elsevier. “The new user interface and smarter search tools enable healthcare professionals to quickly access information in formats they can put to immediate use.”

To encourage use of the new enhanced MD Consult, Elsevier is offering free access to MD Consult throughout May 2007. During this time users can test the site without a paid subscription.

Enhancements
MD Consult revamped its search capabilities and user interface through an extensive process involving input from physicians, medical students, librarians, and other health care professionals around the world. Customers participated in individual interviews, usability tests, focus groups, surveys, collaborative design sessions, and live, observational tests of sample searches.

Innovations in the new version of MD Consult include:

-Recommended results for top searches: Recommended results pages for the most popular search queries within MD Consult are organized according to how physicians diagnose and treat patients.

-Additional search recommendations: MD Consult proactively guides clinicians to add details or refinements to more general searches. For instance, typing in a term such as “hepatitis” would return information links immediately, and also would generate recommendations for more specific terms such as “hepatitis A” or “hepatitis C.”


-Best resource suggestions: MD Consult includes an extensive collection of world leading clinical reference texts and journals. When clinicians are searching for a specific book, author or journal, MD Consult provides a direct link to access the desired resource.

-Easier, faster drug search: Whether clinicians type in the brand name of a drug or its generic equivalent, MD Consult generates a link to the correct information, including drug indications, contraindications, adverse reactions, FDA approvals, and safety notices

MD Consult is an integral component of how Elsevier is continually working to improve outcomes in health and in the business of health. Using it, clinicians can seek current, evidence-based and experience-based answers to specific clinical questions, obtain general overviews on medical topics, make patient management decisions and find drug information. The program also includes topical medical news and provides patient educational materials.

“MD Consult combines the best medical content with the best clinical reference tools to help doctors help patients,” says Brian Nairn, CEO of Elsevier’s Health Sciences Division. “Elsevier has a tradition of providing quality, reliable information for clinicians in academic, patient care and research settings, and now our customers will have faster access to critical clinical information.”

MD Consult now serves over 280,000 users and is licensed by more than 1,700 health care organizations worldwide, including nearly 95% of US medical schools. Subscribers search extensive Elsevier content 1.5 million times per month and view more than 8 million pages of clinical content, primarily during daytime practice hours.