Search Engine for Healthcare Professionals

Search engines have been a critical factor in making the web so useful. I am personally partial to Google. I also find Google Scholar useful when researching complex medical topics. I often tend to use it even before PubMed. In fact, Google Scholar can be used as a portal to search medical article archived in PubMed. Here is a brief description of PubMed:

PubMed is a service of the U.S. National Library of Medicine that includes over 17 million citations from MEDLINE and other life science journals for biomedical articles back to the 1950s. PubMed includes links to full text articles and other related resources.

Now comes news about some recent refinements of a search engine designed specifically for healthcare professionals but also available to healthcare consumers (see: SearchMedica Offers Medical Professionals Six New Specialized Clinical Web Searches). Below is an excerpt from the article with boldface emphasis mine:

SearchMedica.com, the leading search engine for medical professionals, today unveiled six new searchable disease categories. Now, medical professionals can search the Web for credible, clinical information within general medicine or eight more specific categories....Although SearchMedica encourages medical professionals to register to receive updates about new content and tips on how to use various advanced tools, registration is not required....SearchMedica provides free, open access to the Web's most authoritative content for medical professionals. The new organization of disease categories keeps with this mission and simplifies the search process for medical professionals....Medical professionals consistently use SearchMedica with a patient's symptom or disease state in mind....Specialists, however, can refine their search into one of eight therapeutic categories. These categories...include cardiovascular, diabetes/endocrine, infectious, musculoskeletal, cancer/hemic, pediatric, mental/nervous system and respiratory disorders.

I found SearchMedica.com to be sophisticated and very well organized. For example, searching for the keyword anemia in the cancer/hemic category yielded 102,760 results. The opportunity is then provided on the data retrieval page to further refine the search using the following categories: Research/Reviews (15684); Evidence-based Articles (1799); Practice Guidelines (995); Practical Articles/News (4884); Patient Education (3575); Clinical Trials (8142); CME (301); Complementary Medicine (97); and Practice Management (269). In the left hand column of the retrieval page, the option is also provided to narrow the search on the basis of the following types of anemias: normocytic anemia, hemoglobinopathy, infectious anemia, aplastic anemia, cell anemia, chlorosis, spastic anemia, deficiency anemia, macrocytic anemia, and gaucher disease.

I am definitely going to turn to SearchMedica more in the future when the need arises for me to learn more about various diseases. It's a wonderful resource.

Comments

[Dr.Neelesh]

Hi,
I certainly checked out the SearchMedica engine. It surely is as painted by you. Neatly laid out.Not cluttered like so many other sites i know. I think i shall stick with it now till something revolutionary comes up.
Cheers,
Neel.