Electronic research databases provider EBSCO Publishing (EBSCO), US, has announced that its evidence-based point-of-care clinical reference tool DynaMed has been shown to be the most current point-of-care reference tool. A study published recently in the British Medical Journal looked at how quickly five point-of-care products updated new evidence.
The study addressed the importance of incorporating the best available evidence into the clinical workflow and the impact of updates on patient care.
Experts in evidence-based medicine in Italy evaluated the resources without informing the database providers. Researchers identified 128 systematic reviews (comprehensive evidence reports that provide the best current answer to a specific clinical concept) that were considered important enough to change clinical practice and followed the databases every month to determine how long it took for this most important evidence to show up in the resources promoted for doctors to use.
Two months after a systematic review was published, they checked if the evidence was included in each database and then repeated their monitoring every month to measure how long until it would be included. At two months DynaMed already had more than 60 percent of the reviews being monitored, and this increased to 77 percent at three months, and 87 percent at nine months. All of the other databases included less than 50 percent of the important evidence, even after nine months. The researchers even reported that the updating speed of some of the oft-relied upon resources was too slow for them to reliably measure it.
Another study published in the Journal of the Medical Library Association in July tested DynaMed against seven other point-of-care resources with similar results. Also without the knowledge of database publishers, librarians in Texas tested these resources by selecting the top 10 diagnoses and monitored each tool for frequency of updates on these topics. The average number of days between updates in the treatment information was 19 for DynaMed and between 199 and 449 for all the other resources.
DynaMed is a clinical reference tool created by physicians for physicians and other healthcare professionals for use at the point-of-care. With clinically organised summaries for more than 3,200 topics, DynaMed provides the latest content and resources with validity, relevance and convenience, making DynaMed an indispensable resource for answering most clinical questions during practice.
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