It happens frequently: At the tail end of a routine visit, the patient you're seeing fires off a barrage of complex questions about a clinical trial covered in yesterday's news. Your next patient is waiting -- in fact, your next three patients are waiting -- and there’s simply not enough time to respond in depth.
Instead of sending the patient on his way with only the promise of a follow-up conversation at the next visit, you can now direct him to patientINFORM.org, a new Web site designed to help patients access and understand some of the most recent medical research.
PatientINFORM.org presents current medical research in the areas of cancer, diabetes and heart disease, which together account for two-thirds of deaths in the United States. It offers free access to some journal articles, provides “plain-English” translations of their contents and places them in the context of what is already known and being done.
The project is backed by a host of patient health organizations, medical societies, health information professionals, and scholarly and medical publishers -- among them, the American Cancer Society, American Diabetes Association and American Heart Association. These three groups review hundreds of published medical studies from some two dozen publishers and select articles with the highest interest and relevance to the public for inclusion on the patientINFORM.org site.
Not only does patientINFORM.org provide health consumers access to content that is usually available only by subscription, it also employs experts to convert that research into everyday language and provide insight on how research findings fit into the current body of medical literature. With the exception of the Journal of the American Medical Association, many leading medical research publications -- including the New England Journal of Medicine and Annals of Internal Medicine -- are being made available on the site.
