Point-of-Care Resources

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Point-of-care resources offer highly-structured clinical decision tools that allow information on diagnosis and treatment to be quickly retrieved at the patient’s bedside. These resources synthesize and evaluate the most relevant evidence from the primary clinical literature, and they include detailed summaries of a wide range of conditions and interventions, rationale for patient care decisions, and links to original studies. Some of the point-of-care resources listed here are freely available over the Internet, while others are restricted to UNTHSC faculty, students, and staff.

Resources Available Through Lewis Library

Access Medicine
Mobile Version (free personal account required)
A rich source of biomedical information drawn from textbooks, drug guides, practice guidelines, patient education material, and health news. Contains the full text of more than 60 medical books, including Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine, Hurst's The Heart, and the LANGE Basic Science and Clinical Science Series. AccessMedicine also includes USMLEasy, a board exam preparation tool, as well as images and illustrations, case files, diagnostic tools, and videos.

ACP Journal Club
ACP Journal Club's general purpose is to select from the biomedical literature articles that report original studies and systematic reviews that warrant immediate attention by physicians attempting to keep pace with important advances in internal medicine. These articles are summarized in value-added abstracts and commented on by clinical experts.

ACP PIER
PIER (Physicians' Information and Education Resource) is a Web-based decision-support tool designed for rapid point-of-care delivery of up-to-date, evidence-based guidance for clinicians. Information in PIER is presented in a "drill down" format, in which the user clicks from an opening guidance statement through to more specific information.

Clinical Key
Covering all medical and surgical specialties, Clinical Key combines 12 types of content to support evidence-based clinical care.  It provides access to more than 900 current-edition books; 500 top journals; thousands of images, illustrations, and videos; drug monographs; and more.  After creating a personal account, users can build a reading list, save searches, and use the features of the Presentation Maker.

Cochrane Library
A collection of six databases that provide high-quality evidence to support clinical care: Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews; Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, Cochrane Methodology Register, Database of Abstracts of Reviews of Effects, Health Technology Assessment Database, and the NHS Economic Evaluation Database. A seventh database provides information about the groups that comprise The Cochrane Collaboration. The databases are updated either monthly or quarterly. Additional features of the Library include an online journal club and podcasts. [Note: this collection no longer includes the ACP Journal Club, which is now a monthly feature of the Annals of Internal Medicine.]

DynaMed
DynaMed™ is a clinical, evidence-based reference tool created by physicians for use by health care professionals at the point of care. It contains more than 3,200 topic summaries, such as diseases and conditions, symptoms, and medications.  More than 500 medical journals are monitored in order to synthesize the best available evidence for each topic.  Levels of evidence are included, as are ICD-9/10 codes and links to references. The website is optimized for mobile devices and the database is updated on a daily basis.

STAT!Ref
Mobile Version
STAT!Ref is primarily a collection of medical books, including dictionaries and other reference works. The database brings them together for easy searching, or browsing by title or discipline. STAT!Ref also includes point-of-care tools such as ACP PIER, ICD-9 and ICD-10, and the MedCalc 3000 calculation tools. All content can be accessed via a mobile device.

Free Point-of-Care Resources

Clinical Queries (in PubMed)
Offers a filtered PubMed search for clinical studies, evidence-based articles, and medical genetics research by category (therapy, diagnosis, etiology, prognosis).

Clinical Trials 
Developed by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), ClinicalTrials.gov provides regularly updated information about more than 90,000 federally and privately supported clinical research trials in human volunteers. Users can search the database or can browse by condition, drug intervention, sponsoring agency, or geographic location. Database records provide information about a trial’s purpose, who may participate, study locations, contact information, and more.

National Guideline Clearinghouse
Searchable site offering structured summaries of evidence-based clinical practice guidelines. Allows for side-by-side comparison of similar guidelines from different organizations. Provides citations to each guideline’s original source and links to electronic full-text if possible. Sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, in partnership with the American Medical Association and the American Association of Health Plans.

SUMSearch
SUMSearch is an Internet search engine for medical knowledge developed at the UT Health Science Center by Dr. Robert Badgett. It selects the best resources among several full-text books and biomedical databases for the question, formats the question for each resource, and makes additional searches based on results.

TRIP
Provides links to nearly 30,000 items from about 70 sources for evidence-based medicine. Includes links to items found in other sources listed here, along with links to articles from high-quality journals such as JAMA and BMJ.