EMedicine

eMedicine is an online clinical medical knowledge base that was founded in 1996 by Scott Plantz and Richard Lavely, two medical doctors. The website is searchable by keyword and consists of approximately 6,800 articles, each of which is associated with one of 62 clinical subspecialty textbooks. Pediatrics, for example, consists of 14 subspecialty textbooks (endocrinology, genetics, cardiology, pulmonology, etc.). For example, 750 articles comprise the textbook on emergency medicine. Each article is authored by board certified specialists in the subspecialty to which the article belongs. The article's authors are identified with their current faculty appointments. Each article is updated yearly and the date is published on the article.

History
It was sold to WebMD in January 2006. The site is free to use, requiring only registration. More than 10,000 contributors from several countries participated in the creation of the articles. It is operated as an e-book, the articles can be downloaded into a palm top device. It was originally conceived in 1996 as an emergency medicine textbook but its content has expanded considerably since then to include allergy and immunology, cardiology, clinical procedures, critical care, dermatology, emergency medicine, endocrinology, gastroenterology. genomic medicine, hematology, infectious diseases, nephrology, neurology, obstetrics/gynecology, oncology, pathology, perioperative care, physical medicine and rehabilitation, psychiatry, pulmonology, radiology, rheumatology, and sports medicine. Surgical subspecialties include neurosurgery, ophthalmology, orthopedic surgery, (ENT) and facial plastic surgery, plastic surgery, thoracic surgery, transplantation, Trauma, urology, and vascular surgery. It is web-based. dr.m.Arif Toor

Usage among specialists
A 2011 study, Br J Oral Maxillofac Surg. 2011 Jan 14. [Epub ahead of print] entitled "A structured review of journal articles reporting outcomes using the University of Washington Quality of Life Scale," used medline and emedicine as primary sources of information. This is significant because medline is the compendium of all NIH sponsored research. Emedicine is made up of articles translating the body of current research in medline into clinical practice guidelines from the perspective of each subspeciality. A 2011 study, J Biomed Inform. 2011 Apr;44(2):277-88 entitled "AskHERMES: An online question answering system for complex clinical questions." revealed that medline and emedicine were used as primary resources in developing the online system. Physicians were asked to solve complex clinical problems using three different sources of information: AskHermes, Google and UpToDate. Surveys of the physicians who used all three systems were asked to score the three systems by ease of use, quality of answer, time spent, and overall performance.

A 2009 study showed that "89.1% of ophthalmologist respondents accessed peer-reviewed material online, including Emedicine (60.2%)."

A 2007 study showed that 12% of radiology residents used eMedicine as their first source when doing research on the Internet.

A 2005 study ranking 114 sites rated it the second-highest Internet-based source of information for pediatric neuro-oncology, after the site of the National Cancer Institute. http://www.cancer.gov/

A 2002 study described the site's coverage of dermatology as "excellent and comprehensive."