Article type
Year
Abstract
Background:
Understanding health information needs and facilitating its flow and exchange among medical practitioners is important for knowledge translation, dissemination process and understanding gaps in health system information needs.
Objectives:
To understand and analyse the health information needs of medical practitioners in India with respect to synthesized research evidence.
Methods:
We conducted an online internet-based survey via Google Docs using the snowballing technique and disseminating over social networking sites.
Results:
One-hundred and eight medical practitioners had participated in the survey. 53(51%) of responders had encountered uncertainty about best treatment during a clinical consultation on a daily or weekly basis. Majority of them (64, 61%) consulted online resources for resolving these uncertainties with only 12% consulting colleagues and 8% consulting textbooks. On-line resources were considered efficient and reliable way (quickest) by 65 (62%) responders. Awareness and recent access (defined as last week) of various online resources is given in Figure 1 and 2. PubMed (41%) followed by The Cochrane Library (27%) and Google (21%) were marked as most helpful resources whereas Bing (27%) and Yahoo (23%) were considered to be the most unhelpful resource. These are interim results; final results will be presented at the Colloquium.
Conclusions:
There are significant health information needs among medical practitioners in India as evidence by the frequency of medical uncertainties encountered in deciding best treatment and on-line synthesized research resources are an important source to meet this.
Understanding health information needs and facilitating its flow and exchange among medical practitioners is important for knowledge translation, dissemination process and understanding gaps in health system information needs.
Objectives:
To understand and analyse the health information needs of medical practitioners in India with respect to synthesized research evidence.
Methods:
We conducted an online internet-based survey via Google Docs using the snowballing technique and disseminating over social networking sites.
Results:
One-hundred and eight medical practitioners had participated in the survey. 53(51%) of responders had encountered uncertainty about best treatment during a clinical consultation on a daily or weekly basis. Majority of them (64, 61%) consulted online resources for resolving these uncertainties with only 12% consulting colleagues and 8% consulting textbooks. On-line resources were considered efficient and reliable way (quickest) by 65 (62%) responders. Awareness and recent access (defined as last week) of various online resources is given in Figure 1 and 2. PubMed (41%) followed by The Cochrane Library (27%) and Google (21%) were marked as most helpful resources whereas Bing (27%) and Yahoo (23%) were considered to be the most unhelpful resource. These are interim results; final results will be presented at the Colloquium.
Conclusions:
There are significant health information needs among medical practitioners in India as evidence by the frequency of medical uncertainties encountered in deciding best treatment and on-line synthesized research resources are an important source to meet this.