Electronic Highways
Clinical medicine resources at UB
New digital information products provide physicians and other medical professionals 24/7 access to a veritable reference library on their laptop or phone. Through the Hospitals and University at Buffalo Library Resource Network (HUBNET), UB faculty, staff and students have access to many of the same resources used in the clinical practice of medicine. On campus, UB faculty, staff and students have seamless access, but users will have to enter their UBIT name and password for off-campus access to HUBNET. The three major types of clinical resources provided by HUBNET are: (1) clinical decision-making support tools; (2) Drug/pharmaceutical sciences resources; and (3) online medical textbooks.
UpToDate is the most heavily used clinical decision-making tool in HUBNET. Drawn from the literature in over 440 clinical journals, UpToDate provides over 8,300 topic reviews in 16 medical specialties and includes more than 97,000 pages of text, plus graphics, links to Medline abstracts, more than 385,000 references and a drug database. Unlike most other HUBNET resources, UpToDate is not available off-campus.
Physician's Information and Education Resource (PIER) published by the American College of Physicians is a Web-based decision-support tool designed for rapid point-of-care delivery of up-to-date, evidence-based guidance for clinicians. In PIER disease reviews, graded evidence is provided for specific prevention, diagnosis, screening and treatment recommendations. The rationale for treatments and the evidence from literature and treatment guidelines are provided.
Nursing Reference Center (NRC) is a point-of-care resource intended for staff nurses, nurse administrators, nursing students, nurse faculty, and hospital librarians. It delivers the best available and most recent clinical evidence and knowledge on conditions and diseases via a nursing-specific graphical interface.
Lexi-Comp Drug is a compendium of online drug databases that provides updated information on prescription and over-the-counter drugs. A drug monograph in Lexi-Comp includes information on uses, dosing for specific populations, drug interactions, adverse reactions, safety during pregnancy, drug identification, and pharmacokinetics.
Clinical Pharmacology provides clinically-relevant information on all U.S. prescription drugs, plus hard-to-find coverage of herbal, nutritional and OTC products, new and investigational drugs. Clinical Pharmacology monographs are developed through a peer-reviewed process and represent an objective analysis of the most clinically-relevant drug information.
Books@Ovid contains 109 online clinical textbooks in internal medicine, certain medical specialties, pharmacy and nursing. The titles can be searched or browsed individually or collectively. Titles in Book@Ovid include Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine, ACP Medicine, the 5-Minute Clinical Consult and Rudolph’s Pediatrics.
So if you need to research a particular medical condition or treatment, UB Libraries and HUBNET have much to offer. If you have questions about how to use these resources, feel free to contact the Health Sciences Library Reference Desk at askhsl@buffalo.edu.
—Dean Hendrix, Health Sciences Library
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