Global Access — Evidence-based medicine has increasingly become the standard for which U.S. medical care strives, and the Internet is one of the most important tools for accessing updated, evidence-based clinical guidelines. In resource-limited settings (RLS), however, access by health care workers (HCW) to such medical resources is comparatively scarce. In order to determine whether Internet-based medical information resources would be useful in such settings, the publishers of UpToDate, a leading online medical knowledge database, donated their resource to four hospitals within Rwanda, Malawi and South Africa, and teamed up with Dr. Johanna Daily to track its usage in these RLS. Dr. Daily’s study found that the majority of HCW accessed the database at least weekly and searched a variety of topics, and that all users reported that the tool increased their clinical knowledge. This suggests that the provision of Internet-based medical resources could enhance global health care initiatives and improve patient outcomes. Dr. Daily is associate professor of medicine and of microbiology and immunology.
Posted on: Monday, July 09, 2012