A web-based library consult service for evidence-based medicine: Technical development

BACKGROUND: Incorporating evidence based medicine (EBM) into clinical practice requires clinicians to learn to efficiently gain access to clinical evidence and effectively appraise its validity. Even using current electronic systems, selecting literature-based data to solve a single patient-related problem can require more time than practicing physicians or residents can spare. Clinical librarians, as informationists, are uniquely suited to assist physicians in this endeavor. RESULTS: To improve support for evidence-based practice, we have developed a web-based EBM library consult service application (LCS). Librarians use the LCS system to provide full text evidence-based literature with critical appraisal in response to a clinical question asked by a remote physician. LCS uses an entirely Free/Open Source Software platform and will be released under a Free Software license. In the first year of the LCS project, the software was successfully developed and a reference implementation put into active use. Two years of evaluation of the clinical, educational, and attitudinal impact on physician-users and librarian staff are underway, and expected to lead to refinement and wide dissemination of the system. CONCLUSION: A web-based EBM library consult model may provide a useful way for informationists to assist clinicians, and is feasible to implement

Toward an Open-Access Global Database for Mapping, Control, and Surveillance of Neglected Tropical Diseases

There is growing interest in the scientific community, health ministries, and other organizations to control and eventually eliminate neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). Control efforts require reliable maps of NTD distribution estimated from appropriate models and survey data on the number of infected people among those examined at a given location. This kind of data is often available in the literature as part of epidemiological studies. However, an open-access database compiling location-specific survey data does not yet exist. We address this problem through a systematic literature review, along with contacting ministries of health, and research institutions to obtain disease data, including details on diagnostic techniques, demographic characteristics of the surveyed individuals, and geographical coordinates. All data were entered into a database which is freely accessible via the Internet (http://www.gntd.org). In contrast to similar efforts of the Global Atlas of Helminth Infections (GAHI) project, the survey data are not only displayed in form of maps but all information can be browsed, based on different search criteria, and downloaded as Excel files for further analyses. At the beginning of 2011, the database included over 12,000 survey locations for schistosomiasis across Africa, and it is continuously updated to cover other NTDs globally