HSLS Update

FIRSTConsult Provides Point-of-care Information

Point-of-care information products are a relatively new type of clinical information resource. These products are aimed at closing the "question gap"—the well-documented tendency for physicians’ information needs to go unmet as they see one patient after another in the course of a hectic clinical day. Oriented either to the primary care physician or to the specialist seeking information outside his or her own specialty, these point-of-care databases provide immediate access to high-quality, succinct diagnosis and treatment information. They give priority to evidence-based findings and clinical recommendations, and display information in a consistent, standardized format to make it more readily accessible to the busy clinician.

HSLS recently subscribed to FIRSTConsult, an evidence-based point-of-care information resource that can be accessed from the Databases page of the HSLS Web site at <www.hsls.pitt.edu/resources/databases/titles>. Its main components include:

• Over 450 Medical Condition files citing evidence from the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, Clinical Evidence, and the National Guideline Clearinghouse. Evidence is rated according to criteria developed by the American Academy of Family Physicians.
• Differential Diagnoses for 350 chief complaints using a matrix that ranks potential conditions by age and prevalence in a primary care setting. Clinical features for all diagnoses are then displayed in a single table, which can be customized to include or exclude specific diagnostic characteristics.
• Files on more than 30 surgical and diagnostic procedures commonly performed in a primary care setting. Some files include video clips.

Subscription to FIRSTConsult follows systematic testing of it and three other point-of-care products by 14 HSLS librarians. Testers looked at specific interface characteristics and explicitness of evidence-based methods and ratings. They also looked for answers to clinical questions randomly selected from a subset of the National Library of Medicine’s Clinical Questions collection, a growing repository of questions originally asked by family physicians across the country about specific patients. Following testing, librarians for each product met as a group to develop a consensus summary of their findings, which were then used to rank the products on desired characteristics.

FIRSTConsult is integrated with a sister product, MDConsult, which includes full-text journal articles, textbooks, and drug information. PDA users will want to try FIRSTConsult Handheld.

--Patricia Weiss Friedman