MD Consult is an online resource geared toward physicians and other health care professionals. It offers clinicians the means to quickly answer clinical questions and keep current with medical literature by integrating “the most renowned collection of medical content online.” The core collection offers full-text access to forty medical textbooks, simultaneous searching of citation databases including MEDLINE, full-text access to more than sixty medical journals and clinics, information on over 30,000 medications, more than 1,000 clinical practice guidelines, over 3,500 patient-education handouts, and clinical updates including synopses of current medical publications and events. Currently, users can request a ten-day free trial to access MD Consult.
Once logged into MD Consult, the main page is straightforward and easy to navigate. At the top of the page is a simple search box that will yield results in all sections of MD Consult. To bypass this, an “advanced search” link is readily available. Underneath the search box is a series of content tabs that link to various sections of the site: Home, Books, Journals, Drugs, News, Current Practice, Patient Handouts, Learning Center, and MDC Mobile, a new feature which allows users to download news, drug updates, and journal abstracts and initiate searches from their personal digital assistants (PDAs).
The main body of the page contains links to the main highlights of the day and week. Users can quickly scan this for recent happenings and tables of contents (TOCs). One unique feature is the What Patients Are Reading section. MD Consult editors scan the popular press (including the television series ER) each week to learn what patients hear and read about medicine, report on it here, and add links to full-text material (journal articles and patient handouts) on each topic. These daily news reports are handy for librarians who provide customized current awareness alerts to patron user groups.
The journal search feature allows basic Boolean searching, and the advanced search provides additional options to limit a search by author, journal, publication date, publication type or focus, study group, and subject age. The default sorting is by full-text/relevancy. This means that MD Consult full-text articles are listed first in all search results, even if other citations are more relevant to the search query. While the search interface is adequate for citation verification or performing “quick and dirty” searches, it is not recommended for comprehensive literature reviews.
While the search interface is limited, MD Consult does provide access to full-text articles from more than sixty journals and clinics. Of particular note is the full-text access to titles in the Clinics of North America series. Unfortunately, full-text articles are not available in portable document format (PDF) and browsing by TOC or volume is not available. However, MD Consult is a LinkOut provider, and libraries can increase the value and visibility of MDConsult full-text articles by linking to them from PubMed.
Residents and students particularly appreciate the reference book section, which features more than forty titles (several new editions have recently been added) covering a spectrum of disciplines, ranging from allergies to urology. This broad subject coverage, combined with the ability to search all the books at once, can be a considerable time saver over consulting print versions. Users can perform a simple Boolean search that will search the indices of the textbooks and yield results sorted by relevancy. They can select one of the texts by clicking its link and then navigate through it using the search hits results links in the left frame. Alternatively, users can bypass the search function by choosing a title and browsing its table of contents or index.
Certainly other electronic textbook providers are on the market, including Stat!Ref and Books@Ovid. Stat!Ref is not as comprehensive in its subject coverage as MD Consult, and the two products have little overlap in titles. Books@Ovid features a larger collection of titles, available individually, in book packages, or in subject packages with other content.
MD Consult also provides drug information, featuring a drug update section and Mosby's Drug Consult with drug package insert information, indications, approval dates, comparative tables, and cost of therapy information. While this information may not be unique, it is certainly a plus.
While the practice guidelines can be useful, similar content can be found elsewhere. The National Guidelines Clearinghouse is recommended over MD Consult.
MD Consult allows users to customize patient-education materials with specific instructions or marketing information. While this feature is nice, quality patient and consumer information can be found elsewhere. MEDLINEplus is recommended in preference to MD Consult.
Users like MD Consult because of its diverse features, considering it “one-stop-shopping” for authoritative health information, from research to textbooks to patient handouts. Indeed, the value of MD Consult is that it brings a wealth of information from various sources into one interface. While it remains an effective tool that is very popular with physicians and residents, it comes with a hefty price tag. Many institutions can only afford a few concurrent user seats, which leads to frustration when users cannot access the system. Institutional pricing is quite expensive and beyond the means of many libraries.