Table 5.

Relationship of Perceived Usefulness of Quick Medical Reference (QMR) and Diagnostic Confidence with Physician Characteristics (N = 108)

	Perceived Usefulness of QMR		Diagnostic Confidence
Sample Characteristics	r	P Value	r	P Value
Stratification variables:
Year of medical school completion	-0.05	0.58	0.09	0.34
Specialty—Internal Medicine	-0.08	0.44	0.07	0.47
Speciality—Family Medicine	0.06	0.57	0.01	0.90
Frequency of use of QMR in last 6 mo†	-0.02	0.85	0.03	0.75
Length of time using QMR‡	-0.17*	0.04	0.04	0.70
Other demographic variables:
Year of primary residency completion	-0.13	0.20	0.11	0.29
General specialty board certified	-0.23*	0.02	0.06	0.55
General board eligible	0.20*	0.04	0.01	0.89
Other QMR experience variable:
Number of minutes in usual QMR session	0.01	0.92	0.09	0.38
Reported comfort using QMR functions:
Exploring disease profile/associated disorders	-0.08	0.40	0.17	0.08
Case analysis	-0.14	0.16	0.19*	0.05
Asserting diagnosis	0.01	0.88	0.33*	0.00
Work-up protocol	-0.04	0.72	0.15	0.13
Critiquing a case	-0.03	0.76	0.27*	0.00
Differential diagnosis	-0.13	0.19	0.05	0.62
Comparing two diseases	-0.11	0.26	0.15	0.12
Questions for a particular diagnosis	-0.05	0.63	0.07	0.49
Rule-in/rule-out diagnoses	-0.04	0.71	0.08	0.42
Saving a case	0.02	0.82	0.20*	0.04
Saving a case to a text file	0.09	0.34	0.10	0.33
Printing a window	-0.05	0.57	0.19	0.06
Number of QMR functions participants were comfortable using	-0.06	0.92	0.09	0.38

^*Pearson correlation coefficient, P < 0.05, t-test, signficantly different from 0.00.

^†Ordinal scale with seven categories (1, use every day, to 7, have not used during last six months).

^‡Ordinal scale with three categories (1, purchased QMR within last 6 mo; 2, purchased QMR 6 to 12 mo ago; 3, purchased QMR more than a year ago).