PubMed in your pocket
If your handheld computer has an internet connection, you can search the PubMed database. This makes more than 15 million biomedical journal citations and abstracts available at your fingertips. The U.S. National Library of Medicine makes this option available to you in two ways: the “PubMed for Handhelds” web site and the “PubMed on Tap” application.
There are several situations where these tools become useful. The obvious one is a physician seeing a patient in the wards. Searching the literature may help clinicians incorporate the research evidence into clinical decision-making (Sackett & Straus, JAMA 280(15):1336). Medical students may benefit as well. When waiting for a ward round to start, the student can follow up on current research and browse the latest journal abstracts from the top medical journals.
This service has a special web page (http://certif.nlm.nih.gov:8080/nlm/) for searching PubMed. The page is optimized for handheld display. After selecting the search PubMed option, enter your search terms and choose filters to restrict PubMed results that may be useful for clinical questions. For example, the Systematic Reviews filter focuses on systematic reviews including meta-analyses and reviews of clinical trials, while the Clinical Queries filter restricts results to citations about therapy, diagnosis, aetiology, or prognosis.
You can also use the PICO model of formulating clinical questions for PubMed searching. The PICO form includes elements for specifying the Patient/Problem, the Intervention, Comparison of the intervention (if applicable), and the Outcome one hopes to achieve or measure.
One feature that this handheld version makes easier than the main PubMed site is finding citations and abstracts from a selection of the major clinical journals. This means that you can read all the major abstracts in your specialty from this week’s journals.
Finally, you can search NLM’s database on clinical trials (ClinicalTrials.gov) to learn more about a trial’s purpose, participants, locations, contact details, and more. Further instructions are available at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/techbull/ja03/ja03_pda.html.
NLM’s other effort is a handheld application you download and install onto your PDA (http://archive.nlm.nih.gov/proj/pmot/pmot.php). You would use this application instead of “PubMed for Handhelds” when you want more powerful functions for organising and managing search results.
For example, the Cluster Results option organizes search results into their different journal subject areas. There is a Profile tab that allows you to save different sets of limits for filtering your search results. You can select limits for particular publication dates, publication types, journals and more. The Profile tab also lets you use the Systematic Reviews and Clinical Queries search filters. In addition, viewing your previous searches is possible with a History tab.
Another management option lets you save citations onto your PDA’s memo pad. In turn, you can send your results to a handheld computer of your colleague.
Value of handheld searching
How useful would PubMed searching be on your PDA? Those who have wireless laptops or tablet PCs may prefer the full-sized PubMed (http://pubmed.gov) for its full suite of features and display options. At least one group of people would find PubMed on PDAs useful: people who are in a wi-fi environment but can't afford laptops or tablet PCs of their own. Medical students would be a key audience. According to MedicalPocketPC.com, the release of “PubMed on Tap” for the Pocket PC was very well received by students. These are the doctors of tomorrow and we'll see what they will do with these tools.
Published as issue
43 of UK Health Informatics Today (UKHIT)
in the Winter of 2004. UKHIT is the official newsletter of the
UK Health Informatics Society.
