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 is the first of several instalments of our new Community Spotlight series.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Thanks for joining us Richard. Please go ahead and and tell me a bit about who you are and what you do.
I’m an intensivist, critical care internal medicine-based. I’ve been doing it for approximately 40 years and I was Medical Director of the Critical Care Unit in our hospital. In groups, there were about 8 of us involved.
Tell me how you used to stay up to date with research before you discovered Read by QxMD.
Well I subscribed to about 8 to 10 journals a year along with the yearbooks of critical care and yearbook of pulmonary medicine and I would read through the yearbooks when I got them and then try to keep up with the journals monthly as they arrive. It’s a difficult task and as you can imagine, I accumulated a lot of paper..
[Laughs]
..but that’s how I did it!
When I found your app, it was a tremendous benefit because that allowed me to scan a lot more than journals that had material relevant to our needs so I could do that and I would do that pretty frequently. And what I would do once I found it, I would download the article into an app called GoodReader and create files with different subject headings. So this is all on an iPad and I could take it with me as we were doing rounds or having group meetings. And then I would distribute the information to my group via group mail, and we could do right research right at the bedside if we needed to. So it was extremely handy and very good for teaching.
Mhm.. you mentioned that you came across Read. How did you initially stumble across it and what kind of attracted you to try to experiment with it in the first place?
I was trying to remember how I came across it, I think it was in a Medscape article that mentioned the app when they were reviewing medical apps, and to me it looked interesting. I think that QxMD also makes a few other apps that I had used, so I decided to download and try it and it worked out.
To me, it was amazing because our facility had done away with the librarian so there was nobody really to turn to except the internet and after my first day or two using this thing, I said, “This is the way to go.”, so I’ve been using it ever since.
It just made life a lot easier, and I cut down on the number of subscriptions I had but I was still able to review even more literature because of the speed of retrieval and the ability to scan many more journals with this.
How have you seen it change or evolve your practice?
Well it’s helped a lot, especially with severe metabolic disorders that we encounter in the ICU and shock states and therapies for shock. We were able to retrieve the latest literature about this and put that right into practice and into our guidelines.
One article in particular, we started a ECMO [Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation] programme and got that up and running. It’s been running about 5 years now but one article that to me was the most helpful that I found with Read’s help, was the article called “Ethical Dilemmas Encounter with the Use of ECMO on Adults”. This is important because the technology is extremely sophisticated and very labour intensive. This article deals with what do you do with people at certain stage where there is no bridge to anything; to recovery or to survival. How do you deal with those people? What should the ground rules be?
This article, which was from Chest in 2014 actually addressed most of the concerns we had and we actually put some of this into our informed consent documents before people go on ECMO. Of course we had group discussions regarding this and this is extremely useful to us with that.
As far as the other ECMO articles are concerned, most of them are very technical and I was able to share that with our team of nurses and therapists in order to get them up to speed where we thought they needed to be to help take care of the people on the device. So it worked out very very well. Without Read, I probably wouldn’t have come across this.
What kind of impact do you think we would see if more healthcare providers, like yourself, started using Read?
Oh I think a tremendous amount. I think especially residents, medical residents, surgical residents, any kind of resident would benefit greatly from this because they’re able to get directly to the articles of interest. You can run a search to find what you want and the return is very quick. And they could read through it and stay up to date. I think for people like myself in practice, it’s a godsend because time is extremely limited but this helps to stay very current so I really enjoy using it. I also think there’s a way to obtain CME from this as well which was also useful. So I find it an extremely beneficial application to use especially in a busy practice.
Is there anything else that you’d like to share?
I’d just like to share I think whoever thought of this should get an award because it’s great.
[Laughs]
I wish I had thought of it. [laughs] It has made my clinical life tremendously easier and much more beneficial in terms of getting new data, staying current and getting the guidelines that we need to practice.
Now, what I would love to see is that your app embedded in the EMRs that are coming to the fore which I think will be tremendously helpful. So if people hadn’t heard of it, it would already be there and all I’d have to do is open the app and start exploring. So I think that’s a big area, if you all haven’t already done that, maybe you should think about doing that. I think it’d be a tremendous benefit and just like UpToDate is a benefit and is on most computer systems in hospitals and it’s a great thing to have. Yours actually allows extremely current review of the literature, which is what’s needed.
Richard Pesce uses Read by QxMD, a personalized medical and scientific journal, to keep up with the latest medical research in his field.
