Taken from an email I received informing me of the changes. Overall it looks like a pretty solid update.
One of the problems I’ve experienced since leaving pharmacy is keeping up with the medical literature. I no longer have unlimited access to pharmacy journals, medical journals, engineering journals, etc; not to mention less mainstream literature.
While looking at the table of contents from my favorite journals and reading through the abstracts has value, it falls short of providing the same level of information one gets from digging into an article, looking at the data, viewing the tables and graphs, etc.
In an attempt to improve my access to information I signed up for a service called MedInfoNow.
MedInfoNow touts itself as “A personalized weekly email that quickly summarizes the latest journal article abstracts and citations from Medline® important to you.”
MedInfoNow is easy to use. You simply select topics that interest you, the services searches through those topics, puts them into a simple summary and emails them to you once a week. The service provides obvious value by giving me access to several journals in a single location, but MedInfoNow definitely falls short of my expectations. I was already doing much of what the service provides via RSS feeds, Twitter and frequent visits to my favorite informational websites.
The one thing I really need is access to full-text articles. Unfortunately MedInfoNow doesn’t do that. While it does provide links to some full-text articles, those articles are freely available to anyone and don’t require a paid subscription to the journal or MedInfoNow. Bummer.
Is MedInfoNow worth the $129/year I’m paying? Hardly. My subscription expires in June 2012. I won’t be renewing.
Oct 142011
It feels like a day doesn’t go by that I don’t receive an email letting me know of something cool for mobile devices. With the ever increasing onslaught of tablet and smartphone use in pharmacy practice it’s only a matter of time before everything will be available in some electronic media format.
In this case it’s ASHP’s Interactive Handbook on Injectable Drugs: IV Decision Support by Lawrence A. Trissel. Every pharmacist working in a hospital pharmacy knows about this reference. And if they don’t then they have a big problem because it’s only one of the most definitive reference sources for IV compatibility. Over the course of my career it’s simply been know as “the Trissel’s”. (kind of like “the Talyst”…just sayin’ – private joke people)
Oct 132011
I received the email below a few days ago announcing that The Tarascon Pharmacopoeia is now available for Android and the iPad. I’m not a big fan myself, but the reference appears to be popular with certain crowds. Historically it’s more popular with community/retail pharmacists than hospital pharmacists. This might have something to do with the availability of drug pricing in the Tarascon Pharmacopoeia. Who knows.
Link to Android version is here.
Link to iPad version in iTues store is here.
Received an email this morning touting the benefits of a “new product” from Medscape called Medscape Reference. Medscape Reference offers several databases including one for drugs and diseases. In addition there’s a drug interaction checker to boot. I took the interaction checker for a test drive by putting in amiodarone, warfarin and TMP/SMX. As predicted several serious interactions were found. So on the surface it works.
I’ve used Medscape for years. In fact, it was one of the first online reference sources that I signed up for when I became a pharmacist back in 1997. Unlike today, online information was hard to come by back then.
I like the way Medscape has always tailored their content by specialty, i.e. I have my set to Pharmacist so I get mostly information that applies to my profession.
I only spent a little time with Medscape Reference this morning, but it has a nice layout with a good amount of information. Enjoy.
Epocrates Essentials is available for Android. I’ve never been a big fan of Epocrates and have always considered it a product for physicians and nurses. I consider Lexicomp to be the drug information of choice for pharmacists. I’d use Lexicomp on my Droid today if I were still a real pharmacist.
Anyway, I was reading through the MedicalSmarphones.com website and came across the video below demonstrating Epocrates Essentials for Android. It’s pretty cool. I’d love to see it on a Samsung Galaxy Tab or Motorola XOOM. As far as that goes I’d love to see Lexicomp software on a Samsung Galaxy Tab or Motorola XOOM as well.
Opened my spam folder today and found an email announcing the availability of Medscape for Android. While it’s not my favorite drug information resource, it’s decent and it’s free. The application can be downloaded here.
Medscape Mobile is also available for the iPhone, iPad and BlackBerry, just in case you don’t have an Android device.
Over the weekend I read a tweet from a friend and colleague @kevinclauson. The tweet shared a link to an article titled “Young Adults’ Credibility Assessment of Wikipedia”. I don’t have a problem with the article. On the contrary, it just reinforces my dislike of Wikipedia as a healthcare reference source.
From the abstract: “This paper found that a few students demonstrated in-depth knowledge of the Wikipedia editing process, while most had some understanding of how the site functions and a few lacked even such basic knowledge as the fact that anyone can edit the site. Although many study participants had been advised by their instructors not to cite Wikipedia articles in their schoolwork, students nonetheless often use it in their everyday lives.” Kevin also links to the pre-print version of the article here (PDF).
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What a great weekend. The Super Bowl wasn’t a blowout and turned out to be quite exciting in the end. The commercials weren’t extravagant, but were surprisingly entertaining. The one downside was the absolutely embarrassing rendition of the National Anthem sung by Christina Aguilera. For all those would be National Anthem singers out there, please don’t add to or take away from the National Anthem. When you do, you’re doing nothing more than punching this great country of ours in the face.
Anyway, here’s some other stuff I’ve found interesting over the weekend:
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It’s been a good week in the world of non-pharmacy. ASHP Midyear 2010 is behind us, but the work generated from that meeting has just begun. And as usual there were a lot of things that happened during the week, and not all of it was pharmacy or technology related. Here’s a quick look at some of the stuff I found interesting.
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