New Study of Top Five Point-of-Care Tools Finds DynaMed(TM) is the Most Current

DynaMed Proven to be Only Reference with Current Best Evidence, Serious Implications for Quality Patient Care End Quote

(1888PressRelease) November 04, 2011 - IPSWICH, Mass. - DynaMed™ from EBSCO Publishing has been shown to be the most current point-of-care reference tool. A study published last month in the British Medical Journal (http://www.bmj.com/content/343/bmj.d5856.full) looked at how quickly five point-of-care products updated new evidence. The study determined that, "Dynamed clearly dominates the other products…." (BMJ 2011 Sep 23). The study also addressed the importance of incorporating the best available evidence into the clinical workflow and the impact of updates on patient care.

"Slowness in updating could mean that new relevant information is ignored and could thus affect the validity of point of care information services. Ultimately, whenever the transfer of relevant information is inappropriately slow, this can affect the care of patients, potentially denying treatments of proved benefit. This happens despite the fact that many of these products promote themselves to the clinical community as being regularly updated with the latest evidence." (BMJ 2011 Sep 23)

Experts in evidence-based medicine in Italy evaluated the resources without informing the database providers. Researchers identified 128 systematic reviews (comprehensive evidence reports that provide the best current answer to a specific clinical concept) that were considered important enough to change clinical practice and followed the databases every month to determine how long it took for this most important evidence to show up in the resources promoted for doctors to use.

Two months after a systematic review was published, they checked if the evidence was included in each database and then repeated their monitoring every month to measure how long until it would be included. At two months DynaMed already had more than 60% of the reviews being monitored, and this increased to 77% at three months, and 87% at nine months. All of the other databases included less than 50% of the important evidence, even after nine months. The researchers even reported that the updating speed of some of the oft-relied upon resources was too slow for them to reliably measure it.

"Dynamed has a median citation rate of around two months, EBM Guidelines is around 10 months but quite close to the limit of our follow-up. The citation rate of the other three point of care summaries were so slow that they exceeded the follow-up period and we could not compute the median." (BMJ 2011 Sep 23)

In the British Medical Journal study, DynaMed was shown to be at least 78% faster and as much as 97% faster at including evidence than the other resources in the study.

"Dynamed has an updating process that markedly led the others." (BMJ 2011 Sep 23)

A second study also rates DynaMed number one
Another study published in the Journal of the Medical Library Association in July (J Med Libr Assoc 2011 Jul;99(3):247) tested DynaMed against seven other point-of-care resources with similar results. Also without the knowledge of database publishers, librarians in Texas tested these resources by selecting the top 10 diagnoses and monitored each tool for frequency of updates on these topics. The average number of days between updates in the treatment information was 19 for DynaMed and between 199 and 449 for all the other resources.

"Six tools claimed to update summaries within 6 months or less. For the 10 topics selected, however, only DynaMed met this claim." (J Med Libr Assoc 2011 Jul;99(3):247)

Brian S. Alper, MD, MSPH, the founder and Editor-in-Chief of DynaMed and the Medical Director of Clinical Reference Products at EBSCO Publishing says these studies show that DynaMed has the right approach to clinical information. "We know that the systematic literature surveillance and daily updating in DynaMed are key elements that help clinicians find the information they need to treat patients and provide the best care. These studies validate our efforts for the entire DynaMed community and we will continue to keep up with the evidence as it occurs so clinicians can find the best current evidence during practice."

DynaMed (http://dynamed.ebscohost.com/) is a clinical reference tool created by physicians for physicians and other health care professionals for use at the point-of-care. With clinically organized summaries for more than 3,200 topics, DynaMed provides the latest content and resources with validity, relevance and convenience, making DynaMed an indispensable resource for answering most clinical questions during practice.

Updated daily, DynaMed editors monitor the content of over 500 medical journals on a daily basis. Each article is evaluated for clinical relevance and scientific validity. The new evidence is then integrated with existing content, and overall conclusions are changed as appropriate, representing a synthesis of the best available evidence. Through this process of Systematic Literature Surveillance, the best available evidence determines the content of DynaMed.

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