ED physicians produce interactive online textbook
ED physicians produce interactive online textbook
Chicago, IL-Two enterprising emergency physicians are completing last-minute details of what is believed to be the first complete online Internet reference textbook in emergency medicine. The online physician's resource, which will be available by mid-summer, attempts to solve a built-in problem faced by most hardcopy medical texts: instant obsolescence.
"Once a textbook gets published, the information contained in it has taken so long to make it into print, that much of it is obsolete by the time it gets to readers," says Scott H. Plantz, MD, assistant professor of emergency medicine at Mt. Sinai Hospital Medical Center in Chicago.
New clinical protocols and guidelines are constantly being introduced and revised by clinicians in response to tougher demands for efficiency under managed care. The quick, easily updated Internet format gives physicians a perfect medium for easy, interactive access to up-to-the-minute information, Plantz says.
Parts of The Emergency Medicine Online Reference are already accessible to physicians free on web site http://www.emedicine.com/. Plantz and his partner Jonathan Adler, MD, associate program director of the residency program at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, are planning to expand the online textbook to include medicine and surgery, dermatology, ophthalmology, pediatrics, and other specialties.
According to Plantz, the emergency section is comprised of some 700 chapters written by 400 authors and editors from around the world. Each chapter was peer reviewed by at least three practicing emergency physicians, a pharmacy specialist, and a panel of medical grammar editors.
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