The New MD Consult: Smarter. Easier. Better.

MLA Bowling Party

Jeff Lash: Product Director, MD Consult — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 20:31:47 +0000

10th Anniversary Prize Giveaway Winners

Dave Sherman, Marketing Manager — Wed, 09 May 2007 14:20:10 +0000

Congratulations to the winners of our 10th Anniversary Prize Giveaway:

The winner of the grand prize — a $500 Elsevier Book gifte certificate — was Lisa Whittaker

The 100 winners of MD Consult 10th Anniversary Hats were:
Anne Adamczyk
B.P. Agrawal
Richard Alloy
Karinna Andrews
Hassan Arshad
Lloyd Asuncion
Marie Bach
Mary Bach
Holli Bagwell
Joel Bamford
Amy Benson
Venugopal Bhaskaran Pillai
Robert Bird
Jenna Blaustein
Susan Bogar
Orlando Bustillo Jr MD
Alexandre Silvestre Cabral
Alan Chan
Philip Chang
Cristina Checka
Margaret Chervinko
Larissa Christman
Amy Cosnowski
Patrick Cullinan
Danielle Cummings
Karen Curtis
Maria Da Silveira
Samuel Dean
Surendra Deshpande
Sean Devine
Michelle Ehrlich
Wei Feng
Marifel Fernandez
Kimberly Forte
Lorick Fox
Alejandro Gonzalez-Restrepo
Johanna Greenberg
Marcy Haas
Dr.Hamid R Habibi
Kathleen Harder
Eloise Harman
Nichols Heather
David Hendrickson
Michael Hennigan
Eric Herzog
Hannelore Hinds
Sidney Howard
David Hsu
Jon Mikel Inarritu
Soden Jennifer
Bradley Johnson
Huang Joseph
Jane Jung
Christopher Kang
Lisa Kaufman
Kathy Kerr
Jamal Khan
Michael Koehler
Mark Lambrecht
David Larson
Pearl Lee
Nancy Lindo-Drusch
Angela MacPhee
Norma McNair
Bhartendu Mehta
Brian Murphy
James Murphy
Annie Ngan
Francisco Nunez
Richard OBrien
Ted Palen
Manisha Parulekar
Carlson Patricia
Soma Pradhan
Brandy Robinson
Beatrix Roemheld-Hamm
Thomas Rohde
Rebecca Ruth
Claudia L. Sanchz
Jennifer Schram
Richard Seary
To Shelly
Eileen Shirley
Maged Shurrab
Bruce Stewart
Ann Stewart-Akers
Kanya Suphapeetiporn
Edwin Taniguchi
Sarah Taub
Linda Tigert
Mary Tran
Vinay Tumuluri
Eugene Volpe
Matthew Watson
Daniel Weber
Mary Wedel
Howard Wernick
Kabir Yousuf
Gloria Yueh
Gina Zambrano Loor

Congratulations to all of our winners and thanks to everyone who entered! All winners listed above should have received an email with more information. If for some reason you didn’t, contact us.

It’s here!

Jeff Lash: Product Director, MD Consult — Tue, 01 May 2007 19:15:41 +0000

If you haven’t seen it by now, the new Smarter, Easier, Better MD Consult is now available! Try out our new Smarter search with Recommended Results and Search Refinements, see the new streamlined and simpler user interface, and experience better access to the best clinical medical reference information.
Let us know what you think of the enhancements by:

Sending your feedback through contact form
Signing up for the MD Consult Design Partner program
Posting a comment below

Questions from customers — linking to content

Jeff Lash: Product Director, MD Consult — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 16:38:49 +0000

I’ve been talking with a lot of our current customers about the upcoming enhancements, and there’s a handful of questions that have come up several times around linking to content on MD Consult.

I thought it would be worthwhile to post those questions (and answers, of course) here. If you have additional questions, post them in the Comments section below. We’ll answer questions in subsequent posts, and the answers to most questions will be addressed in our improved Help section on the new MD Consult or on the site itself.

Q: We have links to MD Consult journals on our web site. Will those links to journal articles or journals, or books break?
A: No. Links to individual journal articles, to lists of journals, and to pre-formatted journal searches will remain the same. No changes will be required by customers. The MD Consult Resource Center has information for institutional customers interested in learning more about linking to journals.

Q: We also have links to the books on MD Consult — will those existing links to books break?
A: No. Customers will not need to make any changes to links to books provided they are using the “durable URLs” that we provide. “Durable URLs” allow customers to set up permanent links to specific book titles on MD Consult. These durable URLs remain the same regardless of the edition of the book that is on MD Consult. The MD Consult Resource Center has information for institutional customers interested in learning more about durable URLs.

Q: If MD Consult does not have the full text for an article, but our institution has access to the full text through another source, can we link to the full text through the other provider?
A: Yes. In the Spring of 2006, MD Consult added functionality that allows customers to â€œlink outâ€ from MD Consult to full text through another provider. This requires that the institution has a piece of software called a “link resolver.” Articles in MD Consult search results will link to the link resolver; from there, the link resolver directs the person to the appropriate location for the full text. Institutional customers who are interested in establishing this functionality should contact their sales representative or Technical Support. Currently, this functionality is only provided for customers with link resolvers. This functionality currently provides links for all abstracts/citations, regardless of whether the institution has full text access. Links to the full text on MD Consult are still provided alongside links to the link resolver.

Visit us at ACP and APDIM

Mike Smith, Marketing Manager — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 13:20:05 +0000

If you’d like to learn more about the new MD Consult in person, one great way is to visit us at some upcoming conferences where we’ll be exhibiting. Several of us from MD Consult will be at two conferences next week in beautiful San Diego, California and we’ll be glad to show you more about how we’re making MD Consult smarter, easier, and better, and answer any questions you have.

From April 15-18, we’ll be at the APDIM (Association of Program Directors in Internal Medicine) conference at the Sheraton San Diego Hotel & Marina. We’ll be set up in Booth #24, where you can also get a sneak peek at some other new products from Elsevier.

From April 19-21, you can find us at the ACP (American College of Physicians) Annual Session / Internal Medicine 2007 at the San Diego Convention Center. Look for us in Book #1603 in the exhibit hall to learn more.

Hope to see you there!

Youâ€™re invited to a FREE MD Consult Live Webcast!

Jeff Lash: Product Director, MD Consult — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 13:48:06 +0000

Join us for a FREE one hour web-based seminar where you can learn how the new MD Consult will provide smarter search results and easier access to the best medical content. MD Consult Product Director Jeff Lash will take you on an EXCLUSIVE virtual tour of the new MD Consult coming this Spring!

Date: Thursday, April 26, 2007
Time: 4:00 PM EST

Register now for the free webinar!

Youâ€™re invited to a FREE MD Consult Live Webcast!

Dave Sherman, Marketing Manager — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 12:46:52 +0000

Date: Thursday, April 26, 2007
Time: 4:00 PM EST

Register now for the free webinar!

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Smarter Search, Part 5: Recommended Results

Jeff Lash: Product Director, MD Consult — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 06:00:14 +0000

Welcome to our final installment of our week-long series on what’s behind the “smarter search” coming soon to MD Consult. Today we’re looking at one of the most exciting enhancements — Recommended Results.

On MD Consult, as on most web sites, the most frequent queries make up a large percentage of the overall searches. The top 100 queries represent 5% of total search volume. To put that another way — 1 in 20 times, a search on MD Consult will be for only one of 100 terms.

These are broad terms, most often diagnoses and diseases but sometimes symptoms. The most common search queries include searches like:

acne
COPD
diarrhea
hepatitis
hypertension
lupus
obesity
sepsis

For these terms, there are tens if not hundreds of thousands pieces of content that contain the search term. Rather than presenting thousands of results, we will provide Recommended Results pages for which we have selected the most current, relevant, and clinically useful content for the most common searches on MD Consult.

These pages are organized by how physicians look for information to answer their medical questions — by Overview, Etiology, Diagnosis, Treatment, Management, Prognosis, etc. The Recommended Results pages also include links to relevant Patient Education handouts, Practice Guidelines, search refinements for more specific topics, and other relevant information.

The standard search results are still available, with the top 3 results from each section shown under Top Results from All Sections. Links to search results for each specific type of content along with the number of associated results are provided as well.

There you have it — the end of our week-long look at the building of a smarter search on MD Consult. To recap, here’s the five enhancements:

Improved synonymy
Better query interpretation
Addition of search refinements for certain types of searches
Addition of search recommendations along with regular search results for certain types of searches
Presentation of Recommended Results for the most common searches on MD Consult

Thanks for reading and please let us know what you think of the enhancements!

Smarter Search, Part 4: Search recommendations

Jeff Lash: Product Director, MD Consult — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 06:00:38 +0000

Welcome to part 4 of our week-long series on MD Consult’s new smarter search that’s coming this spring. Here’s a recap of what we’ve covered so far — MD Consult’s enhanced search will have

Next on our list is a very exciting addition to MD Consult that will provide search refinements along with regular search results for certain types of searches.

For many searches, we do not know for sure what someone is looking for, but we can make a reasonable guess based on what is included in the query. Here are a few examples of these types of searches:

Cecil Textbook of Medicine
Anesthesiology Clinics of North America
Head trauma handout
Wellbutrin XL

For all of these searches, it is possible to make a reasonable recommendation about what content may be appropriate â€“ a link to a specific book, a specific Journal/Clinic, a specific Patient Education handout, or a specific drug monograph.

Search recommendations for these types of searches will be provided at the top of the normal search results page. We will still provide the regular search results, in case our assumption is not correct, but provide the Recommended Result at the top of the results page since it likely may be exactly what someone is looking for.

Come back tomorrow for our final installment where we’ll talk more about Recommended Results!

Smarter Search, Part 3: Search refinements

Jeff Lash: Product Director, MD Consult — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 06:00:32 +0000

This week we’re taking a closer look at how MD Consult’s search will be “smarter” this Spring. We’ve already discussed improvements to synonymy and better query interpretation. Today we wanted to give you an overview of how we’re using search refinements to provide quicker and easier access to the best clinical medical reference information.

In addition to just looking for all of the documents that contain the terms that someone entered into their search query, we will be classifying that term and potentially providing suggestions for how to “refine” the search for more specificity and accuracy. For example, a search for “gout” would be identified as a disease, and the following refinements may be displayed:

Etiology
Pathogenesis
Signs
Symptoms
Diagnosis
Differential Diagnosis
Treatment
Complications
Prognosis

Each of these refinements would run another search â€“ for example, selecting Prognosis would search for “gout and prognosis.”

Refinements will be included for searches that are classified as diagnoses, symptoms, procedures and other clinically relevant categories.

Refinements may be tailored for specific searches as well. For example, a search for “depression” may include the same refinements as shown above for gout, since they are both diagnoses, but may also include refinements like “postpartum depression.” Other refinements could include “in children” or “in adults” (e.g. Asthma in Children, Asthma in Adults) or â€œand pregnancyâ€ (e.g. Asthma and Pregnancy).

Feedback from physicians and librarians on these search refinements has been very positive and we believe it will provide substantial benefits to those who start their quest for information with a very broad term and then look to narrow down the subject matter that they are researching.

Come back tomorrow for part 4 of our week-long series — we’ll be showing you how we will provide search recommendations along with some search results.