Attention physicians, medical office staff and medical librarians. Here is a useful new online resource for finding continuing medical education courses. CME Click is neither perfect nor very pretty, but it is a handy tool when a procrastinating physician (or a highly efficient one who has only just been informed about a new mandate) needs to meet a CME requirement as quickly as possible.

Medical librarians and administrative staff in hospitals and other medical settings are often asked to help busy physicians find courses that will enable the latter to meet continuing medical education requirements. These requirements are crucial to matters of licensing and vary widely by specialty by state and medical specialty. The poor office and library staff often do not possess expertise in this field. Consequently, they find themselves frantically but unavailingly thumbing through catalogs (and lamenting the fact that they had only just discarded stacks of such things) of the many for-profit companies and of medical societies and professional associations that deal in this lucrative arena. Pity the bewildered medical office manager trying to determine if some events meet ethical standards (such as those offered by pharmaceutical companies). What doctors and their harried staff need is a free online directory of CME opportunities.

Well, here is a new service to check out:  CME Click. According to its press release:

“…Medical professionals can search multiple formats – online, conference, lecture, seminar, publication, audio-, video-, and computer-based – by specialty and location (of) courses..”

So is it good? It is serviceable. The interface is nondescript and there are typos that don’t exactly instill confidence in a first-time user that this is a state-of-the-art tool for today’s medical professional. (Example of typo, “Secialty checklist that will filter results based on your selection…”)

There don’t seem to be any RSS feeds or details about what the email newsletter might consist of and forget about a screencast showcasing the merits of the service. From a Web design standpoint CME Click is circa 1999.

But if you are in need of handy compendium of CME opportunities, CME Click is okay and okay is pretty good considering what a hassle it can be to find CME courses. You can search by date and there is a fairly broad range of specialties (e.g., Adolescent Medicine, Allergy & Immunology, Internal Medicine, Perinatology, Medical Genetics). It is open to partnering opportunities with organizations hosting and listing CME courses (though hospitals and other medical institutions and medical libraries with Web sites would probably be better off just purchasing data from CME Click and designing their own pages or just linking to it).

There are also internal consistency problems. For instance, it says on one page, “CME Cick [note that the name of the company is misspelled] does not accept advertising to ensure there is no conflict of interest. Your organization can feel comfortable placing your CME on the site knowing that advertising by pharmaceutical companies is restricted…” and on another, “Reach medical professionals with your targeted message. Advertising on CME Click offers targeted spots based on keyword searches. Your message will reach the right professional, in the right specialty…” I guess that means drug companies no, everybody else more or less yes.

The major selling point of CME Click is that is provides links to the actual Web sites detailing the CME opportunities. That feature does a great deal to put the clunkiness of the rest of the site in perspective. CME Click would save medical people looking for CMEs time. Although, actually, not all that much time would be saved given that the dates of courses are not given on the All Courses page. I clicked on such things as Advances in Psychiatry and A Clinical Update on Intrauterine Contraception only to find that those courses had been held some weeks back. Lots of fruitless clicking then in a tool that is supposed to streamline the process of finding CME courses. True, there is value in being able to learn that such and such a course was offered at one point and what entity offered it. But the potential users of this service are far more likely to want to know what they can get their patrons signed up for now, not what they could have attended had they known about it.

This is a good idea that just needs Web design and search engine interface know-how help.

Now, if a firm like Deep Web Technologies or Niche Tank were to redesign this site, it might take off. It’s a nice little niche player.