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Powerful Web Resource Available For Physicians |
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SHINE, a resource designed to help physicians and others at Stanford conduct fast parallel searches through many different sources of medical information, was launched in January through a Stanford Web site (http://shine.stanford.edu). To use SHINE, your computer's Web browser must be Netscape 3.0 or Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 or a more recent version of either. The current version of SHINE is a test version, or beta release. Any physician, researcher, student or staff member can access it from within the Stanford campus. Physicians who are off-campus will be able to access SHINE if they are enrolled in the beta evaluation, a "real-world" test of the program. "In the future, we hope to be able to give anyone access to SHINE, but the licensing issues with content providers will need to be worked out, and this will necessitate pioneering a business model to make that possible," said Paul Godin, medical director of SHINE and a staff pulmonologist at the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System. The database is designed to improve patient care and medical education, said project director Kenneth Melmon, professor of medicine (clinical pharmacology) and associate dean for postgraduate medical education. SHINE enables users to access such key resources as the National Library of Medicine's online database (PubMed), the medical textbook Scientific American Medicine, National Institutes of Health consensus reports, practice guidelines, the Micromedex drug database, and primary care teaching modules developed by Stanford and UCSF faculty and staff. The diverse information resources are integrated, Godin said. "We've been trying to create an integrated environment ... so you can follow an unbroken chain of knowledge, and that's never really existed before," he said. For example, let's say your search leads you to an entry from a textbook, which contains a reference to an article in a medical journal. You can bring up an abstract of that reference in PubMed with a click of the mouse, and you can then update the references using the "related articles" function of PubMed. Eventually, the SHINE Web site will provide a gateway to consultations and collaborations between physicians, Godin said. He envisions SHINE as one component of an integrated telemedicine system that helps doctors in other locations to consult with specialists at Stanford. Future versions of SHINE will include more textbooks and other written information, as well as a large database of videos, he said. Another feature that will soon be available is CME credit for physicians who use SHINE to answer clinical questions. The system will keep track of the search trajectory and all of the articles and other resources consulted during a search. "Based on that record, we can then award [category 1] CME credits," Godin said. This is an entirely new paradigm for CME, he noted. Both the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) and the Americal Medical Association have reviewed and approved the SHINE ap-proach, making it the first self-initiated learning program leading to category 1 CME credits, Godin said. |
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