The company started in 1995 as an
electronic medical information service with a primary care
focus. The idea was to go to the major medical publishers and
seek out their content to create an electronic collection. The
original partners in MD Consult were Mosby, Saunders and
Lippincott. Today, through mergers and acquisitions, the
company is owned by Harcourt. "We priced it too high," says
Hewitt "and publicizing it to individual doctors is
extremely expensive. So we revised
our business model retaining individual subscriptions but adding site licenses for
institutional customers like hospitals and medical schools."
Since
the change in marketing strategy, institutional subscribers to MDConsult.com have grown rapidly bringing
the number of searches to one million a month with over
5 million pages of clinical content viewed.
 MD
Consult outperformed
15 other services
The service outperformed 15 other online
clinical information resources in a study conducted at the
University of Iowa College of Medicine and published in the
July 1999 issue of
The Journal
of Family Practice. In the study, MD Consult correctly answered the highest
number of clinical questions of any resource studied, provided
the best documented answers, and required the second fewest number of
links to find an
answer.
The database has two primary
sections:
Answers and Updates. The Answer side offers the complete text of 40 authoritative
books, 50 premier medical journals, the complete prescribing information for over
30,000 medications taken from Mosby's Generex, and 600 peer reviewed
clinical practice guidelines prepared by medial associations and societies,
and 3,000 patient education handouts. Doctors can customize the
handouts by adding their own comments, for example on treatment or medications,
and make them look as if the handout is their own by
putting their name on it.
Peer
reviewed
material on current topics
The Update service is created from
several news sources and is updated hourly. "So we have Today
in Medicine showing hot topics from professional periodicals,"
says Hewitt. "What Patients are Reading looks at medical
topics in the popular press. It doesn't matter what part of
the world you're in, physicians today are being overwhelmed by
better informed patients asking pretty good questions. If
you're a
GP, you'll meet patients who have thoroughly researched a subject.
So we provide peer reviewed material on current topics to help
doctors prepare for the inevitable questions."
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Also in the Update section are the
content pages of the major medical journals, recent drug
approvals by the FDA and a CME centre with over 200 modules to
earn category I credit. MD Consult stresses that
the service is highly intuitive. "It has to be," says Hewitt
" because there's a huge range of expertise using
the service from an old physician to a young medical
student. If it's not intuitive, if it doesn't function well, nobody
will use it."
Cost
effectiveness of new versions
With its current push into Asia, Hewitt
believes reaching individual subscribers will be difficult.
"Our existing customers are predominantly institutional. We
need to keep that focus as that's where our business model is
coming from." There are no plans to produce an Asian version
of the service. Says Hewitt, "I've visited many countries and
everyone states that some of the content might not be exactly
how they do it. But in medicine, English is pretty universal
for medical content. In terms of customizing,
down the road we'll have the technology
to do special versions but its cost effectiveness is
going to depend on how big the market is. For
example in Asia, we wouldn't put MD Consult
in another language, but we would add content produced in
Asia."
Non mainstream or alternative
medicine isn't catered to. "The reason why," according
to Hewitt, "is that the size and focus of the
company won't attract enough paying users. It's the kind
of information that would be nice to have, but there
is a cost associated with it. So we're
selective what we include." But new products are on the
horizon.
In July MD Consult Cardiology will be
launched. It will function much like MD Consult
except tailored to cardiology. One unique component will be a
database that monitors clinical trials. The service will also
include Braunwald, the bible of cardiology that will be update
monthly. In the autumn another new product for
respiratory and infectious diseases will also be added to the
service.
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