Keeping a Finger on the Pulse of the Latest Medical Research

Read by QxMD Community Spotlight: Gabriel Makar

This is the fourth instalment in our new Community Spotlight series. If you missed the first three, you can find it here, here, and here.

We recently reached out to some of our users to understand how they’re using our Read app. We learnt so much about their struggles in keeping up with the medical literature and how they’ve integrated Read into their workflow to simplify their workload. There were many great stories that came in so we thought we’d share a few of our favourites. Hopefully, you can pick something up from these Q&A sessions to further optimize your practice!

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Hi Gabe, thanks for joining us. Go ahead and tell us a bit about who you are and what you do.

Thanks for having me. My name is Gabe Makar. I’m one of the medical students over at Cooper Medical School at Rowan University. I’m in my third year of medical school. Before medical school, I spent a lot of time doing research in my undergraduate institution. Then I took some time off at Columbia and did some genetic research in congenital anomalies in the kidney and urinary tract (CAKUT). Now here I am in medical school and I’m focusing a lot of my efforts on research in a few different fields and that’s sort of my path right now and where I stand and we’ll see where I go afterwards.

How did you stay up to date with research before you started using Read by QxMD?

So before Read, I would usually go read journals that I knew. I would go to their websites and look at their current issues. Something else I would really do is go to PubMed and search a few of my keywords and I would click “Most Recent” and see if anything came up. It was a little inconvenient because you would miss a lot of papers and if you search a few general terms on your topic on PubMed, you’d get thousands and thousand of results back.

So before Read that’s usually what I would’ve done, I would’ve looked at the journals’ website and occasionally I would pay for a few journals but that got expensive if it wasn’t covered by my institution because personally, I like to print papers and read them. So before that, it was usually just through some well-known journals that I would read and then the occasional PubMed or Google and kinda look and see if anything recent would come up on those searches.

How did you initially discover Read and what got you to use it?

What initially got me to Read was.. I believe I actually googled, “Apps for Research”.

I don’t remember the exact website, but I remember there being a website that had four or five apps that were new apps and helpful apps in research. I remember Read being one of them. So at that time I downloaded Read and I linked it with my institution’s e-mail and everything to make sure that I could load up any journals that we were subscribed to. I think there were also other websites that really stressed that Read was a good app so I decided to download it and try it for myself.

Since you’ve been using it, how have you seen it change and evolve your workflow or your practice?

For me, it really changes the way I approach research and the questions that I have. I think the way Read really has affected my day-to-day, whether I’m in the hospital helping with patients or over in the research lab and working on projects or writing. I think it really shows you what is the most current research that’s going on. I think you have to be at the forefront of a lot of new projects and a lot of the recent literature. For me, it helps practice evidence-based medicine.

When you have a certain patient with a certain condition and you can search that more smoothly through Read. For me, having the ability to search certain conditions and see evidence-based medicine really changes the way I approach patients. It helps me in having more confidence and that the way that I’m approaching them, the way that I’m treating them is really going to be the best for that patient.

And it really helps me in my research practice where I’m able to see even when you’re writing papers and you’ve done your literature search. Maybe it’s a year ago you’ve done your literature search, you’re at the tail end of writing your paper. It still allows you to be up-to-date with a lot of the recent literature that’s still being published on your topic. Because they don’t always get published in the same journal but the way that Read pulls them all towards a certain topic you have or a certain field, it really helps me stay on top of all the current research that’s going on. So it also really helps me focus my questions depending on where the momentum is in research. I think that’s really important. A lot of funding also depends on momentum and it really helps to show me where current research is going and where we are moving together as a field in medicine.

One of the other features that I love about Read by QxMD is the Keyword feature, specifically, the ability to use Boolean operators to really search specific topics. For Read it’s a special feature and makes looking for papers regarding your patient, project, discussion, etc. easier because it shows you the conclusion of each paper one after the other. This way you can swiftly look through a great number of papers without taking too much time. You can then click on the paper and it’ll show you the entire abstract and if that bodes well with you then you can read the entire paper and use it to your liking!

This personally has been a huge help for me when looking at literature to cite for certain grants or papers where I can find these papers and then put them in a folder for later when I want to use them. This has helped me tremendously recently in my work and another remarkable feature is that the keywords will also refresh when a new paper fits the description! This way even if you have already searched pages of your original search, if a new paper that discusses those keywords is published it will automatically notify that you have a new paper fitting that description. This way you stay up-to-date on the latest news regarding all of your work.

Would you mind sharing a specific example stands out to you over the years of your usage of the app?

I could think of one paper — I can’t remember the exact title but it was a recent paper on “Opioid Use and Prescribing Habits by Opioid Surgeons” [the paper Gabe is referring to can be found here]. I believe that was very similar to the title and I’m currently working on a project studying opioid use and hip replacement surgery. It was prospective study that we did and we’re working on finishing the paper and submitting it. When I just read that paper, we had done our literature search a while ago, our introduction was written… everything. But that popped up on my feed on Read and it was the perfect timing to incorporate that and I think I would not have found that because at the current moment, I’m not routinely, you know, looking up current literature on opioids known. We’re at the tail-end of our project, we’re about to submit.

I think the opioid epidemic is real and it’s happening and it shows that there’s a lot of research is really being geared towards that and it really shows us that there’s still demand for better understanding in this topic. And when I saw that paper, it really stressed how significant our paper was and it made our paper stronger so we sort of incorporated a few points from that, you know, showing that our topic is current and it’s necessary and previous studies support that our work was needed. So I think that was a current example that we really enjoy.

What kind of impact do you think we might see if more healthcare providers or researchers like yourself started using Read?

I think that we’re gonna see a lot more evidence-based medicine and I think that when you stay on top of your research, you’re really staying on top of current work, current trends in medicine. And I think this is really the way medicine should be practiced. A lot of times we still see people practicing treatment strategies or algorithms that are sort of out of date. And using Read, you really stay on top of what’s the new evidence-based approach to treating this certain patient and I think it really helps formulate a practice where you know you’re confident that you’re always giving your best foot forward when treating your patients. And I think that’s one of the number one things that should be placed in the forefront of any physician’s mind is that really I’m putting evidence-based medicine to practice when I treat and approach any of my patients.

And I think it’s tough at times because it’s hard to stay on top of certain literature and certain research because a lot of it’s scattered but I think Read really pulls it all together. If you’re in a clinic that’s treating a lot of HIV patients, you can even have HIV as a certain topic in Read and it pulls HIV topics and papers on HIV towards that one area and then that way you stay up to date on HIV and treatment strategies. And I think that’s how Read will eventually change medicine in the future.

Is there a feature that’s not currently in Read that you would like to see and that you think might be able to help us serve you and physicians such as yourself a bit better?

I think Read is really well equipped, it has a lot of great strategies and I think there aren’t many things at all that I think could be improved. One thing off the top of my head is, you know, Read makes it really easy to skim a lot of papers quickly, it provides you the abstract and the conclusion.

And I think that in the future, I think maybe one thing is maybe looking at the “History.” I’m not sure if that’s already a part of it, I think going back and looking at a history… because sometimes if you don’t save that paper or the paper is not directly part of one of your categories, one of your subcategories, it might be a little difficult to go and trace back sometimes some of those papers. Because you can really swift through a lot of papers through Read and I think that might be something worthwhile in the future.

[After the call, we showed Gabe the “Recently Viewed Papers” feature under “Saved Papers”, and it was exactly what he was looking for!]

Finally, is there anything else that you would like to share right now?

I think that I’ve said a lot and I think that Read overall is going to help physicians and anyone really in healthcare towards putting evidence-based medicine to practice at an easier way than getting a journal every month and then flipping through the journal and seeing what in this journal is prevalent to my patients. Instead, Read brings you what you think and what you search and what you want to be prevalent to your patients and your practice. And it brings it to you at the palm of your hand and I really am impressed with it. I’ve been using it for many years now and I think it really is going to change medicine, it’s going to change research. And I think in the future, it’ll be sort of a staple on a lot of physicians’ and researchers’ wheelhouse.

Gabriel Makar uses Read by QxMD, a personalized medical and scientific journal, to keep up with the latest medical research in his field.