Bringing Evidence-Based Research into Medical Practice
Read by QxMD Community Spotlight: Sanjiv Gray
This is the third instalment in our new Community Spotlight series. If you missed the first two, you can find it 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 Sanjiv, go ahead and tell me a bit about who you are and what you do.
My name is Sanjiv Gray. I’m currently a practicing trauma surgeon in Orlando, Florida, where I practice a mix of trauma surgery, general surgery, and surgical critical care. Also, I have a lot of interest in obesity medicine and bariatric surgery. So those are my main two specialties. Otherwise, I like spending time doing research and with medical students who are in education.
How did you stay up to date with research before you started using Read by QxMD?
Prior to this, to try to keep up with the research, you have to subscribe to individual journals. For the Lancet journal, for the American College of Surgeons or the New England Journal of Medicine or JAMA. I’d go to each individual journal and pretty much subscribe to those journals. I’d wait for those monthly updates as to what’s new in the field or what’s in that particular journal.
What initially got you to use Read and how did you discover it?
Actually, a friend who at the time was doing some research at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, who got introduced to it and introduced it to me. I can remember I was searching for something I needed. He stopped me and said, “No, there’s a better way. Check out this website, it’s pretty cool.”
At that time I did not know about the app. So I visited the website and it was pretty good because so many individual journals would come up. He pointed out that once you use your institutional login you would be able to pull the entire journal. At the time, I was training at the Colombian resident program through Harlem Hospital. So it was good knowing that I could get that exact PDF of the journal article without going from PubMed to the journal websites and so forth.
How have you seen it kind of change or evolve your practice over time?
I think it’s just when I’m the on the move, I can pull up an abstract of a journal article just right here. If I’m in the middle of like a clinical shift and someone says, “Hey, have you ever heard about this before?” You could quickly search and right there you get the evidence.
For example, at one point we were discussing hyperoxia in patients with traumatic brain injury. We’re going back and forth with the trauma team asking “Is it detrimental? Because there was that one article that said it was detrimental”.
Right there in the middle of the conversation, I pulled out my phone and I just typed in “hyperoxia traumatic brain injury” and immediately you could see that there were more articles favouring not detrimental versus those said yes. As a team, we could just quickly pick 10 good articles, from reputable journals and look at those the same day. So to me, that’s one of the ways that it has really helped.
Also, I must say I’m getting those weekly or daily updates on your Keywords or Top Journals or Recommended Reads. It’s been pretty helpful to me because it’s kind of a reminder, “Hey, this is what’s coming up, this is what’s new.” You could quickly glance at it if you’re interested, skip it if you’re not.
By using the Keywords, almost every day I’m looking at something new or something that’s as you say ‘Trending’. I think it keeps you up to date. I find that I’m in a very busy practice and I find that it’s not too time consuming. I think with modern medicine, with an app as good as this one, it’s something you could do in your spare time, while you have downtime on the job or so forth. It’s a very easy way to just keep up to date because it’s right there at your fingertips literally.
Is there a specific example that stands out to you over the years of your usage of the app?
I would say that example I gave just right now with hyperoxia, where right there I was able to go all into it was a good one.
Even just using it, many times I’ve done presentations and people will say, “That article is just perfect for that topic.” And I’d say, “It’s great that the database the app pulls from allows you to kinda hone in properly when you’re doing things like that.”
On top of just keeping articles on my laptop and I’m also able to keep my own little database in the app. So even if sometimes I cannot access the particular article, at least I have the abstract that I can go back to.
What kind of impact do you think you might see if more healthcare providers started using Read just like yourself?
I think it’ll show improvement in evidence-based practice. It will also cause more discussion to be had if you personally know “this is what’s new”. As you could see on social media, where people are watching what’s trending or not. What is something that’s interesting to you? That’s the part that everyone is speaking about… it’s in the news, it’s in the media. Then it’s actually up to my reaction to it whether it’s for it, or against it, or neutral, but it’s there for your attention. I think if more people are getting updates on what’s new — you’re picking your own keywords, so this is something that you’re interested in. It really helps me to stay abreast of what’s going on in the field, what’s going on in medicine.
Also the fact that experts use it is really helpful. In comparison to other [computer] programs, I know one that we use it in my surgical communities as an essential search cardinality database, other programs look at papers and say, “Hey, these are key papers that you should know in surgery”. Back in the day, these papers would have just been whatever your program knew.
But now, you could look at something and be like, “Hey, this is a very important paper” that other people in the community overall have identified as a groundbreaking landmark paper within your field, and it gives an opportunity to look at that paper and say “Hey, other surgeons are looking at this. I probably should look at it too.”
Finally, is there anything else you’d like to share that you didn’t get to talk about?
I think I realized for the first time, probably a year and a half ago, that Read was actually taking note of us reviewing articles and reading them and with that, we’re able to go through and get some CME credit for it. I think that’s pretty good. I’m sure knowing what particular articles we’re reading would help us with the CMEs because sometimes particular institutions would want to know not just the aided research but the particular subject you read. For example, in the world of trauma, they want trauma-specific CMEs. So I think if there’s a way that you could say, “Okay, you got 12 credits and the 12 credits are related to these 12 articles”, and so forth. I think that would be very helpful to most people because most specialties want that specialty-specific CME.
Sanjiv Gray uses Read by QxMD, a personalized medical and scientific journal, to keep up with the latest medical research in his field.
