Jerry Fahrni

Staying up to date with medical literature isn’t easy

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Jerry Fahrni

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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.

Comments

7 responses to “Staying up to date with medical literature isn’t easy”

  1. rxINFORMATICA

    I have access to all that literature and I’m still falling behind. It’s information overload. One issue I have is that I’m so focused with learning one area that I fall behind in others. Have you used Journal Watch (http://www.jwatch.org/)? You choose the topics, and they cherry pick the breaking literature abstracts for you from multiple journals.

  2. Jerry Fahrni

    I was aware of Journal Watch, but hadn’t given it any thought in a very long time. Perhaps it’s time for me to give it another go. Thanks for the info.

  3. Dan Doody

    Dr. Fahrni,

    I read your blog post about MedInfoNow with great interest and would like to thank you for subscribing and offering your frank assessment to your readers. My colleagues at Doody Enterprises and I developed MedInfoNow 11 years ago to help busy healthcare professionals like you and those in your audience stay current with both the journal article and book literature in the most time-efficient way possible. And you’re right – no single web site can bring a user full text of the articles cost efficiently. Indeed, only 17% of the journal articles indexed in Medline are available for free at any given time. The rest are the property of the publisher, and most publishers require payment to either subscribe to their journal or to download a single article. The average annual subscription fee for a biomedical journal ranges between $175 – $200, and the fee for buying individual articles averages $15 – $20 per article. That’s quite a price for anyone to stay informed, especially when there’s so much information that needs to be read. You’re not alone in your desire to reduce your cost while maintaining a connection to new research. There’s a great opinion published in Scientific American that describes this situation in very similar terms to yours. You can find it here: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2011/12/09/1-vs-the-99-case-for-open-access/.

    We believe that our service actually saves you money and time by delivering to you a summary of specific information you may need, allowing you to quickly determine its value, and directing you to the site where you can purchase the full abstract if desired. For the cost of only 6 – 8 articles on the pay-per-view basis over that same two year period as your subscription (your subscription expires in June, 2013), your $129 bought you two-years of an automatic weekly email report of the newest information that’s most important to you. In addition to saving you the time it takes to search each week, we trust our service also saved you the cost of purchasing abstracts and/or journal subscriptions that weren’t really what you had hoped.

    But we also can save you money in other ways. MedInfoNow subscribers can set up a sophisticated profile that focuses on topics they’re interested in that are published only in the journals they are interested in tracking. As a UCSF alumnus, you may have rights to access articles from the ejournals UCSF licenses through its proxy server. If you have those privileges and you re-set your profile at MedInfoNow to reflect your affiliation with UCSF, then you can link from an abstract on MedInfoNow directly to the article as long as it’s in UCSF’s collection.

    We developed MedInfoNow on the premise that time is a healthcare professional’s most important asset. As you pointed out, staying current with developments can be a very time-consuming process, even overwhelming. MedInfoNow’s goal is to help the busy healthcare professional always be prepared in the most time efficient way possible by delivering valuable information while filtering out unwanted information.

    I’d welcome the chance to continue the dialogue with you and would welcome any opportunity to help you get the most from your Medinfonow subscription.

    Dan Doody
    Publisher, MedInfoNow
    dan@doody.com

  4. Jerry Fahrni

    Hi Dan –

    Appreciate you taking the time to stop by, offer up some tips, and for providing me with the link the the Scientific American article. I’ve wrestled with how to keep up with the literature since I became a pharmacist. There really isn’t a perfect way. I only realize how much I miss full access to articles now as I’m no longer in a traditional pharmacist role.

    I agree that MedInfoNow provides a valuable service, and I’m sure it provides many subscribers exactly what they need. It’s just not what I was looking for.

    Feel free to contact me any time. I’m always willing to chat about anything related to pharmacy, even access to literature.

    Thanks again,
    Jerry

  5. Dan Doody

    Hi Jerry,

    Thanks for your response. I’d welcome the chance to chat about pharmacists’ access to literature. Please either give me a call (312-239-6226) or send me an e-mail (dan@doody.com) with information on how I can call you.

    Looking forward to continuing the dialogue,

    Dan

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    […] gave me the opportunity to post a comment on his blog and point out that about 17% of the articles indexed in Medline are available for free […]

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