Using the Internet to Improve Knowledge Diffusion in Medicine.

Medical professionals are facing an information crisis. Medical knowledge is expanding and changing at an unprecedented rate, yet practitioners often do not become aware of important advances in a timely manner. While more than 360,000 articles are published in medical journals every year, knowledge diffusion to clinicians is typically slow. For instance, one study found that two years after wide publication, fewer than 50% of general practitioners knew that laser surgery could save the sight of some of their diabetic patients. Retrieval systems, using concepts and modifiers entered directly by clinicians or automatically by electronic medical records systems, could rapidly display chinks of relevant summary information and provide links to supporting evidence and analysis. To realize this vision, a combination of content, information science methods, and technology is required. Clinicians need access to a wide variety of information including medical literature, expert summaries as found in textbooks and guidelines, information on medications and diagnostics tests, and procedural knowledge such as health-plan coverage or institutional policies. For instance, MEDLINE, the nine-million-record bibliographic database produced by the National Library of Medicine, contains citations to the last 30 years of medical literature and has been available for three decades.