Using the Internet to improve knowledge diffusion in medicine

Despite advances in medical diagnosis and therapeutics, diffusion of new medical knowledge to practitioners is typically slow; frequently, it takes years for an important change in medical knowledge to make its way into daily clinical practice. Barriers to knowledge diffusion such as lack of immediate access to up-to-date information resources, ignorance of the availability of relevant information, and limited time for inquiry can be addressed by new network-based retrieval systems that deliver current and relevant information to the point of clinical need. These systems, using terms entered directly by clinicians or automatically by electronic medical-record systems, can rapidly display chunks of relevant information at the time of an information need and provide links to supporting evidence and analysis. We describe three network-based systems that are in daily use addressing specific clinical information needs: WebMedline, a Web application that facilitates retrieval of the bibliogr...