“NLM Announces Expan­sion of PubMed Health

New Resources Cre­ate a Com­pre­hen­sive Online Resource for Clin­i­cal Effec­tive­ness Reviews

The National Library of Med­i­cine (NLM), the world’s largest med­ical library and a com­po­nent of the National Insti­tutes of Health, announces the expan­sion of the infor­ma­tion avail­able from PubMed Health (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/), which pro­vides inte­grated access to clin­i­cal effec­tive­ness reviews.  

NLM’s National Cen­ter for Biotech­nol­ogy Infor­ma­tion (NCBI), in part­ner­ship with England’s national Cen­tre for Reviews and Dis­sem­i­na­tion, the Cochrane Col­lab­o­ra­tion, the US Agency for Health­care Research and Qual­ity, and other agen­cies in the US and abroad, now makes avail­able more than 18,000 clin­i­cal effec­tive­ness reviews via PubMed Health. PubMed Health orga­nizes these clin­i­cal effec­tive­ness research results, includ­ing full texts as well as sum­mary infor­ma­tion, for con­sumers and clinicians.

Effec­tive­ness stud­ies are essen­tial for informed clin­i­cal and con­sumer deci­sion mak­ing. Mul­ti­ple stud­ies are nec­es­sary over time, and inter­pret­ing their com­plex and often con­flict­ing results is a challenge.

Sys­tem­atic reviews of clin­i­cal effec­tive­ness stud­ies address this need with rig­or­ous sci­en­tific method­ol­ogy. How­ever, they are scat­tered across the bio­med­ical lit­er­a­ture and the Web sites of pub­lic health agen­cies around the world that pro­duce many of them. The National Library of Med­i­cine is uniquely posi­tioned to gather these crit­i­cal clin­i­cal resources in one place.

Users of PubMed Health can: 

• Access the whole com­pre­hen­sive col­lec­tion of resources in a sin­gle search, includ­ing can­cer infor­ma­tion for con­sumers and clin­i­cians from the National Can­cer Institute
• See the results of a simul­ta­ne­ous search for reviews in PubMed
• Refer to con­sumer med­ical ency­clo­pe­dia search results also deliv­ered simultaneously
• Fol­low RSS feeds of fea­tured reviews and “Behind Head­lines,” which looks at the research behind news stories
• Learn to make sense of research results in its “Under­stand clin­i­cal effec­tive­ness” and “Behind Head­lines” sections
• Share resources via e-mail and social media with “Add this”

NLM invites you to visit PubMed Health, learn more about the Web site (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/about/) or fol­low the project on Twit­ter @PubMedHealth (https://twitter.com/PubMedHealth) to help you keep up with the evi­dence on health­care effectiveness.”

Source: NLM New files for the week of Dec 12, 2011 (NLM Announces)