Features of Effective Medical Knowledge Resources to Support Point of Care Learning: A Focus Group Study
Open Access
- 25 November 2013
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Public Library of Science (PLoS) in PLOS ONE
- Vol. 8 (11), e80318
- https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0080318
Abstract
Health care professionals access various information sources to quickly answer questions that arise in clinical practice. The features that favorably influence the selection and use of knowledge resources remain unclear. We sought to better understand how clinicians select among the various knowledge resources available to them, and from this to derive a model for an effective knowledge resource. We conducted 11 focus groups at an academic medical center and outlying community sites. We included a purposive sample of 50 primary care and subspecialist internal medicine and family medicine physicians. We transcribed focus group discussions and analyzed these using a constant comparative approach to inductively identify features that influence the selection of knowledge resources. We identified nine features that influence users' selection of knowledge resources, namely efficiency (with sub-features of comprehensiveness, searchability, and brevity), integration with clinical workflow, credibility, user familiarity, capacity to identify a human expert, reflection of local care processes, optimization for the clinical question (e.g., diagnosis, treatment options, drug side effect), currency, and ability to support patient education. No single existing resource exemplifies all of these features. The influential features identified in this study will inform the development of knowledge resources, and could serve as a framework for future research in this field.Keywords
This publication has 42 references indexed in Scilit:
- To Compare PubMed Clinical Queries and UpToDate in Teaching Information Mastery to Clinical Residents: A Crossover Randomized Controlled TrialPLOS ONE, 2011
- The practice of evidence-based medicine (EBM) in gastroenterology: discrepancies between EBM familiarity and EBM competencyTherapeutic Advances in Gastroenterology, 2011
- AskHERMES: An online question answering system for complex clinical questionsJournal of Biomedical Informatics, 2011
- Speed, accuracy, and confidence in Google, Ovid, PubMed, and UpToDate: results of a randomised trialPublished by Oxford University Press (OUP) ,2010
- A Review of Online Evidence-based Practice Point-of-Care Information Summary ProvidersJournal of Medical Internet Research, 2010
- Answers to Questions Posed During Daily Patient Care Are More Likely to Be Answered by UpToDate Than PubMedJournal of Medical Internet Research, 2008
- Patient-Care Questions that Physicians Are Unable to AnswerJournal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 2007
- Factors Associated with Medical Knowledge Acquisition During Internal Medicine ResidencyJournal of General Internal Medicine, 2007
- Googling for a diagnosis—use of Google as a diagnostic aid: internet based studyBMJ, 2006
- Effectiveness of Clinician-selected Electronic Information Resources for Answering Primary Care Physicians' Information NeedsJournal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 2006