Welcome to the Virtual Medical Library e-Newsletter. The purpose of this newsletter is to announce new resources added to the FSU Virtual Medical Library, to feature established online resources to acquaint students and faculty with these resources, mention a cool feature of some PDA resource, and remind everyone how to access our Library resources from off campus. The featured resources for this month are DynaMed and Mobile Merck Medicus.
The newsletter archives on the web:
http://med.fsu.edu/library/LibraryHandout_00.html.
This newsletter in pdf for printing:
http://med.fsu.edu/library/Newsletter200405/Newsletter200405.pdf
The library will open normal hours through June with the exception of the Memorial Day holiday on Monday, May 31, when it will be closed.
Greetings to the Class of 2008 and incoming Bridge students!
Formal library orientation is scheduled for three sessions on Thursday, June3.
However, feel free to come in or contact us at any time if you have questions.
Click on image to go to site.
Dynamed, which stands for Dynamic Medical Information System, was created and is managed by a nationally recognized evidence-based medicine expert and physician, Dr. Brian S. Alper. It is a peer-reviewed reference resource containing detailed and up-to-date information on almost 1,800 topics and disease states.
Figure 1. A-Z Listing.
Areas covered include descriptions (and ICD-9 Codes), causes and risk factors, complications, associated conditions, history, physical, prognosis, treatment, prevention and screening, patient information and references. Dynamed is updated daily with hundreds of journals monitored and 41 journals systematically reviewed for the most recent evidence based literature.
Follow the link from our Library web page, then click on Login. No userID or Password is required. You can search by category or via an A-Z listing. (Figure 1.)
Figure 2. Categories.
Once you arrive at the document you want to read, you can either read one specific section or “expand” the document and read it in its entirety. To facilitate answering specific clinical questions, the information on each topic is organized into categories shown in Figure 2.
Figure 3. References.
Bottom line, high level recommendations are presented first in each category. In newer entries, the level of evidence is presented. Where available, all information is linked to specific full text references which include among others, journal articles, Cochrane abstracts, ACP Journal Club abstracts, and InfoPOEMS. (Figure 3)
Highlighted in this newsletter is an added feature that allows FSU users to link directly from references in Dynamed to PubMed and from PubMed on to full-text links for FSU-subscribed journals. A search was conducted on “Hypothyroidism.” Once the document was expanded, a full description of “Hypothyroidism in general” was available for reading as one document via scrolling. The last figure provides an example of the linking feature that will take you directly to the article for further reading. (Figure 4)
Example of linking feature to PubMed:
Figure 4. Link to PubMed.
This free resource is now available to all medical students and physicians.
It requires you register at the Merck Medicus site before you can download.
It gives you the choice of Palm OS or PocketPC versions,
and lets you select the package with the Merck Manual which is 9M
or the Lite version without the Merck Manual at 1.2M.
It seems to run from the SD card without problems.
Download it from this site:
http://merckmedicus.com/pp/us/hcp/hcp_mobile_medicus.jsp?t=H0030:
Here is a breakdown of what is included:
The Merck Manual, 17th Edition: Much like 5 Minute Clinical Consult, this resource has a long list of presenting problems and diagnoses. For each disease there is at a minimum of sub-topics to include General, Symptoms, Signs and Diagnosis, and Treatment. The organization is not consistent so it will take some use to become comfortable with it. Merck is disavowing any responsibility for the content and one faculty member pointed out some dated information found in the resource.
Pocket Guide to Diagnostic Tests: This resource includes a long list of imaging, microbiology and laboratory tests. The imaging tests give you the cost of the test, indications, advantages, disadvantages/contraindications and preparation. For laboratory tests, it gives you the cost, physiologic bases, interpretation and helpful comments. For the microbiology tests, you are given the cost, organism, specimen/diagnostic tests and comments. This resource alone is worth the time to register, download and install. Several of our faculty wanted us to buy this resource for our students. (If purchasing through Skyscape, you would pay $34.95 for this resource.)
Reuters Medical News: This updates when you sync, downloading briefs of the latest medical news in the specialty you declare when you register.
MEDLINE Journals: Also updates when you sync, this pulls in the abstracts for the articles in the latest edition of the following journals, American Journal of Medicine, Annals of Internal Medicine, BMJ, JAMA, Lancet, Medicine, and NEJM.
There are a number of other medical reference programs for the PDA. A link to some these can be found on the PDA Software page of the FSU Virtual Medical Library.