User:Muhammad Al-Sharifi

Medex Arabia:

Doctors use some 2 million piece of information to manage their patient's medical cases during their clinical practices.

Few sophisticated studies about the nature of the information which doctors may need while treating patients has been done.

About a third of doctors' time is spent recording and synthesizing information.

Yet most of the information doctors' use when seeing patients they keep in their heads in what has been called "a constantly expanding and reinterpreted database.

The information deficiency has become more serious as the rate of change in medical knowledge has accelerated.

Medical knowledge will increase fourfold during a professional lifetime. Inevitably, doctors cannot practice high quality medicine without constantly updating the information within their heads and finding information to help them with particular patients.

Research on doctors’ information needs was performed by Covell in 1985. 269 doctor's questions were raised during the interviews after 409 patient visits. About two questions for every three patients seen.

Questions were about:

- Treatment of specific conditions: one third

- Diagnosis: 25%

- Drugs: 14%

- Questions of second medical opinion 45%

- Non medical information about social patient management 16%

Textbooks, journals, are sources of information for answering the questions that arise: textbooks are out of date, and "the signal to noise" ratio of journals is too low for them to be useful in daily practice. But the best information sources provide relevant, valid material that can be accessed quickly and with minimal effort. Doctors in developed countries seem to be overwhelmed by the information provided for them. The amount of information is enormous and disorganized, and it is hard to find the answers to questions that arise in consultations.

We in Medex Arabia with the support of Medex Canada have established an advanced and interactive medical website that enables the doctor to get monthly abstracts of hundreds of distinguished, reviewed and Arabic translated medical international articles. The latest medical news in addition to useful essentials in the diseases diagnosis summaries was added. Also the website enables the member's to add their own CVs in addition to their own medical articles and publish them on the website after revision by a consultant medical teamwork.

Muhammad A. Al-Sharifi | Executive Manager | Medex Arabia, Inc.