This is the second instalment in our new Community Spotlight series. If you missed the first one, you can find it 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 Sean! First of all, tell me a bit about who you are and what you do?
Sure, thanks for having me. My name is Sean Fox, I am a Professor of Emergency Medicine at Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte, North Carolina. I am one of the program directors for the residency program, and I’ve been involved in medical education and training of residents and medical students for the past 10 to 15 years depending on when you count time. And I have been a blogger, I guess for lack of a better word, producing educational content on the internet since 2007 and have a pretty widely read Pediatric Emergency Medicine educational blog that has lots of medical references and literature that it uses to backup its content and support its content.
Okay, so you must be really up-to-date on research. Can you tell me how you stayed up-to-date with research before you started using Read by QxMD?
So… in the archaic days, I used the medical library and I would do PubMed searches and through the PubMed search, I would then collect my desired articles. I would then use the electronic library of the medical college that I was affiliated with and hope that I would be able to find actual PDF versions of the full article that I could read.
Mind you, I published content weekly, so this became very arduous. I would spend a long amount of time, a significant portion of the time and development of a weekly educational morsel [post on Sean’s blog] was dedicated just to curating the articles and obtaining the PDF so I could read the article and then I’d still have to generate the information that I wanted to include. So it was mostly the traditional way of PubMed searches. Fortunately I didn’t have to physically go to a library, I could go to the electronic library, but many of the electronic libraries still were clunky, and never gave you direct access, you had to log in through different firewalls multiple times. It was quite arduous.
How did you come across Read and what initially got you to use it?
I think I had just been scanning through random tech journals and other things. I can’t recall exactly where I had come across it, but I was doing a presentation on medical education and had included it as a tool. And in order to give the presentation, I decided to download it and start utilizing it.
At that time, I think there was another product that was out there that I was comparing it to. However, the other product didn’t work as well and didn’t give me access to as many articles so because of that I favoured Read by QxMD. And then just through that process of using it, I became more essentially dedicated to it.
Then shortly after that, I moved my website to a WordPress site, and discovered that Read had a WordPress plug-in that would allow me to easily insert my references (which was also a very time-consuming part of production). The plug-in worked out so nicely that just putting in the PubMed ID automatically inserted my references the way they should’ve been. And so that’s how I kind of stumbled upon it and then kind of fell in love with it, kind of used it and kind of spread the word to other people that I work with about its utility. As you can imagine a lot of people I work with are also in medical education, so they are struggling with the same problems that I was facing.
Could you give us an example of how it managed to change your workflow in terms of maintaining your weekly blog, and how it has helped your colleagues in terms of their workload as well?
Sure, now instead of having to dig hours through PubMed and then trying to find the full text articles in the electronic library, they came up real easily. So now if I have the topics that I’m interested in, say ‘appendicitis and pediatric management’, I just essentially search within Read those two items and then sort through the articles by relevance. All of them I usually am able to obtain full text PDFs of and usually add them into folders [Collections], many of the folders I didn’t share publicly, but I have produced over 400 posts and have an equal number of folders, each folder with the collection of PDFs that I used.
What’s really nice is I can annotate as I’m reading that article. I’ll just highlight the things I need, circle whatever I want. In-text PDF annotations come in really handy. Then I can either just use it right from that folder on my tablet to write the article or I can AirDrop it over to my laptop or email it to myself or email it to my colleagues also. If there’s a project I’m working on with someone else, I will often use it just to forward the articles that the group is working on to everybody, directly from Read. It’s become my de facto library I use essentially for my initial research and often my in-depth research.
What kind of impact do you think we might see if more healthcare providers, who are medical educators like yourself, started using Read?
So I’ve convinced pretty much everybody that I work with to use it because of its efficiency. So it just saves on time. The only way we can get full text articles really is going through our medical library, appropriately so, but they are not really geared for the clinician that needs to be dividing her or his time amongst clinical duties, as well as research duties and other complications, they’re really designed for librarians really. Read is set up for me — who needs the information now, clinically, maybe while I’m working. I need to reference this article now, so it’s really fast, I can pull up in PDF and give it to my resident or medical student right now. It’s not a matter of searching and the laborious effort that it takes to do that through your traditional library system.
Before we end this Q&A session, is there anything else you’d like to share?
What I tell all my colleagues is that this really changed how I am able to function. It made me much more efficient. If I still had to do the research the way I had been doing, I probably would not continue with the project as long as I have. Again, I’ve been doing it for 10+ years and there would be no way that I would have the effort or the energy to persist in doing it. Read just makes it so much easier to do. It’s probably the most useful tool I’ve encountered from a productivity standpoint in a long time.
Sean Fox uses Read by QxMD, a personalized medical and scientific journal, to keep up with the latest medical research in his field and find credible current research for his medical education blog.
