We’ve been speaking to users to better understand how they use Read and what we can do to make it even better. We’ve had some fascinating conversations and wanted to share some of these examples with the wider Read community. Hopefully, it will inspire you to use Read in new and different ways. Today, we’re sharing our conversation with a Radiation Oncologist who uses Read’s search function on-the-go to help make evidence based treatment decisions.
“There are scenarios where we talk through complicated cases. Sometimes we want to be able to use data or studies to help us make decisions, but might not have that information in the back of our minds or otherwise at our fingertips.”
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
What do you find most useful about Read by QxMD?
I think the thing that is most helpful to me is that the app has a fast, easy search function with access to the full PubMed directory. So it’s what you would be searching at your desk if you were looking for literature, but you can access it anywhere.
In what scenarios are you searching for literature?
One example is looking up relevant data in tumor boards. There are scenarios where we talk through complicated cases. Sometimes we want to be able to use data or studies to help us make decisions, but might not have that information in the back of our minds or otherwise at our fingertips.
So being able to quickly search abstracts, if not the full paper, at any time, quickly and in any situation where I maybe wouldn’t be at my desk, it’s very helpful. And if we’re on campus and on our hospital Wi-Fi network then I would have access to the full paper as well.
[If you link your account to your institution using your normal login details you can access full papers anywhere!]
In the tumor boards? Is it a multi-disciplined team or is it a group of radiation oncologists?
It’ll be a multi-disciplinary team in that setting, but the same is true if we were talking in a group setting in the radiation oncology department, we would do the same thing. We’d use it sometimes in chart rounds, which is where we review cases before they’re treated. So, if we’re talking about clinical information and looking for data to choose a course of treatment, whether that’s in a multidisciplinary setting or just in our department it’s helpful to have quick access.
Do you have any specific examples you could share where the papers you found influenced your discussion?
An example [from head neck cancer], is finding information on a particular gene mutation that is unusual, the SMARCB1/INI1 mutation. In a tumor board, we were discussing treatment pathways and we were using Read to search relevant data and talk about different ways of approaching it.
Did any of the search results or papers that you found influence how you ended up treating that patient?
Yes, certainly. I’ve used it to find, for this and similar patients, a paper talking about induction chemotherapy followed by radiation versus surgery first followed by radiation. Using that paper has definitely guided our care in a few situations. That would have been something that I was looking up during the tumor board to find that paper and discuss the treatment pathway that it recommended.
