Posted by Jeff Lash: Product Director, MD Consult
MD Consult is celebrating its 10th Anniversary in 2007. Ten years is a lifetime in Internet time. The number of physicians who had access to web-based medical information in 1997 was much smaller than it is today. MD Consult has grown dramatically and become a trusted resource used by hundreds of thousands of physicians, students, librarians, and medical professionals around the world.
The practice of medicine has changed in the past 10 years as well. We have seen an increased need to quickly and easily access clinical reference information online to answer medical questions. It is increasingly challenging for clinicians to keep up with changes and new developments in medicine that can help improve patient care.
Just as medicine and the Internet have changed since 1997, MD Consult is continuing to grow to ensure that it continues to be the most valued and trusted resource for medical information.
This spring, we will be unveiling the most significant changes in our 10-year history. These exciting enhancements are the result of thousands of hours of research with physicians, students, librarians, and medical and health professionals. Our focus is to create an easier-to-use MD Consult that improves access to the best medical content.
The new MD Consult we’re building will be smarter, easier, and better.
While we have made many enhancements to search over the past several years, this is one area where we knew we could still do better. With customers performing nearly 1.5 million searches each month, it is clearly the primary way to gain access to our high-quality content.
Rather than just make incremental changes to improve specific areas, we realized we needed to re-think our approach to search. We spent a lot of time analyzing how search works on other medical sites and other web sites and came to the conclusion that we could create a “smarter” search engine that would do a better job of getting you the answers you are looking for.
Our new smart search doesn’t just find all of the documents on MD Consult that include the words you typed in — we understand more about what you’re really looking for. Search on a drug name and we’ll provide a direct link to the medication information. Search on an abbreviation, and we’ll not only search on the full phrase but any relevant synonyms. Search on the names of journals, books, authors, or other common types of content, and we’ll provide direct links to those resources. You should see improved search results on nearly every query on MD Consult.
Additionally, for many searches, we will provide Recommended Results and Search Refinements, making it easier to access the best medical information.
Enter in a diagnosis and we can provide suggestions to “refine” your search to more specific topics. For the most common search queries on MD Consult, we’re creating special Recommended Results pages that organize the results based on how physicians think about information — not by books and journals, but by Signs and Symptoms, Etiology, Diagnosis, Treatment, and Prognosis. These recommendations are pulled from the most current, most clinically useful, and most relevant content on MD Consult, and where available, we’ll also provide direct links to Practice Guidelines and Patient Education handouts.
Physicians have enough to think about — you shouldn’t have to think about how our search engine works. And now you won’t have to. You can spend less time trying to find medical information and more time using that information to improve patient care.
One of MD Consult’s strengths is that it provides access to a vast amount of high-quality clinical information. Unfortunately, at times it can be hard to find, access, and use that information. Our new user interface will help make it easier to use MD Consult.
The new design has been crafted to make it easier, simpler, and less complex to get the answers you need. We have received input through extensive usability testing, surveys, focus groups, and other research with physicians and librarians. The feedback we have received so far is extremely positive, with customers commenting that the interface looks much simpler and cleaner, that it’s easier to access and read information, and that it provides an overall improved user experience. We will be sharing previews of the new interface on this site and providing the story “behind the scenes” so you can learn more about some of the changes and the work and feedback that went into them.
Many of you are already regular users of First Consult, our evidence-based point-of-care companion to MD Consult. These enhancements will also improve the utility of First Consult as well.
MD Consult customers who also have First Consult have long been able to search both products at once through “federated” searching in MD Consult. Now, with MD Consult’s improved smarter search, results from First Consult will be even more accurate and relevant, making it even quicker and easier to get to evidence-based point-of-care information. Searching on First Consult will be improved as well to take advantage of these enhancements.
There will also be improved connections between MD Consult and First Consult. See an interesting reference in a First Consult Medical Topic? Just one click gives you the full text on MD Consult if it’s available. No more writing down citations and going to another search engine to access the full article.
Overall, customers who have both MD Consult and First Consult will see an improved experience. Whether looking for the “short answer” for point-of-care on First Consult or the “long answer” for more in-depth reading on MD Consult, you will always be able to find the right answer.
As we’ve been working on creating a smarter, easier, and better MD Consult, we’ve undertaken a comprehensive analysis of the content on MD Consult. We want to be sure that we are providing the highest-quality, most relevant, most current, and most appropriate information for clinical reference and clinical decision-making.
We are making some changes to the content on MD Consult, and we’ll share more information on our content changes on this site in the coming weeks. [Update, March 11]. Our goal is to focus on the highest-quality clinical reference content and enhancements — such as smarter search and an easier-to-use interface — to make it quicker and easier to access that content, while providing content that is important to you, our customers. To that end, the following areas will no longer be available on MD Consult this spring:
Additionally, while In This Week’s Journals will remain on MD Consult, we will be removing the Featured Journals from this area and no longer covering journals in our Specialty Services (Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine; Infectious Disease; Pain Medicine).
Any decision to remove or discontinue content is not one that we take lightly. We believe that the changes we are making to MD Consult will help make it an even more useful source for answering your clinical medical questions.
MD Consult has long been known as a premier resource for medical content, and these enhancements will make MD Consult an even more valuable resource. We’re creating smarter search results that understand what you’re looking for and provide better, more relevant, more appropriate, and more useful results. We’re making it easier to access the best clinical reference information available online. We’re building a better MD Consult.
You’re probably wondering when this is happening. We’re planning on having the new smarter, easier, better MD Consult available to you by the end of April 2007. We wanted to let you — our customers and users — know ahead of time so you know that the changes are coming, and as we get closer to the date, we will be providing more information on this web site, in our various newsletters, and in direct communication with our customers.
You can sign up for our email mailing list to receive periodic updates about the enhancements. You can also read our blog, where we’ll be posting more information about the changes, some “behind the scenes” tours, screenshots, photos, and other things to keep you informed.
We’re very excited about the enhancements that are coming soon and we look forward to telling you more about them in the coming weeks. Thank you for your support through our first 10 years and we are looking forward to your support for the next 10!
Sincerely,
Mike Takats
Vice President and General Manager — MD Consult
