I have just been playing around with a trial of MyEBMSearch. According to its FAQs, “MyEBMsearch is a search engine specially developed to help medical practitioners find medical evidence really quickly. Highly advanced technology enables MyEBMsearch to find precisely those abstracts most relevant to your needs as a medical practitioner.”

For those of you who are acronym-challenged, EBM is evidence-based medicine–the idea being that only those practices that have been proven to be effective should be used. Pretty basic concept. But if you talk to doctors over seventy they make clear that this really is a revolution given how much medical practice used to be based on assumptions based on what one medical provider told another rather than what had been subjected to the rigors of controlled trials, meta-analyses and so forth.

I was quite impressed by MyEBMSearch. It has a nice clean interface and I got quick and accurate results on my search term, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

This is a subscription-based service and they make that very clear in the FAQs:

“Can I share my subscription with a colleague? No!

Your subscription to MyEBMsearch is strictly personal and non-transferable.”

But this is a tool that medical librarians might want to look at. In terms of full text it says, “Should your institute have subscriptions to specific journals and make use of implemented link resolving software, the full-text links in MyEBMsearch should give direct full-text access to journals you have subscribed to.”

I didn’t see that I could limit my search to English and I didn’t like the flashing banner ad at the top asking, “Your banner here?” The granulation offered is pretty minimal at this point. But then the point of MyEBMsearch is to provide front-line clinicians with a cut and dried version of what they need to know, not the full panoply of possible answers to each query. The results I got were quite on target and I got them quite quickly.

It has handy features such as My Saved Searches, My Collections, My Journal Update.

All together, MyEBMsearch is worth a look by those in health care with budgets robust enough to support an array of search tools for their providers. I didn’t see anything that absolutely wowed me, but it is good tool. There is a lot to be said for solid results delivered in an unspectacular but consistent fashion.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 3rd, 2008 at 11:00 am and is filed under Reviews, Verticals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.