We’ve given you an overview of the enhancements coming to MD Consult this spring, but we wanted to provide some more details around what our new smarter search will do and how it will work.

There are five main things being done to improve searching on MD Consult:

1. Improved synonymy
2. Better query interpretation
3. Addition of search refinements for certain types of searches
4. Addition of search recommendations along with regular search results for certain types of searches
5. Presentation of Recommended Results for the most common searches on MD Consult

Each day this week, we’ll provide some details about one of these enhancements. Today, let’s talk about Better Synonymy.

MD Consult has always used synonyms and other thesaurus terms to ensure that all of the relevant content on the site is found when searching. For example, a search for “heart attack” will search for any mentions of “heart attack” as well as “myocardial infarction.” With the new MD Consult, term expansion will be extended to be more inclusive of clinical terminology.

Improvements in this area will provide more and better synonymous terms for medical searches, including:

• Producing the results for generic / brand name drugs
  • Example: Regardless of whether someone searches for a brand name like Coumadin(R) or the associated generic name (warfarin), we will provide the same search results. Not all users know if the drug name they are querying is a brand or generic name. Now they should expect to find all references to that drug, regardless of how the document refers to it.
• Better interpretation of acronyms
  • Example: Regardless of whether someone searches for “DVT” or “deep vein thrombosis,” we will provide the same search results.

These types of searches have always been possible on MD Consult and usually produce the desired results, but these improvements will ensure they are nearly always interpreted correctly. The additional synonymous terms will uncover additional relevant content that previously was not included in search results.

Come back tomorrow for Part 2 and learn about how our new smarter search will have better query interpretation.

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