Survey of user preferences from a comparative trial of UpToDate and ClinicalKey

Abstract

In December of 2011, the A. T. Still Memorial Library at the A. T. Still University of Health Sciences was invited to be a beta test site for ClinicalKey, a major new point-of-care and research platform recently introduced by Elsevier. The advance marketing for ClinicalKey implied its use as a point-of-care-product for physicians. Over the past several years, library staff had been exploring an institutional subscription to UpToDate, so we decided to conduct a side-by-side trial of the two products and to survey participants about their experiences and preferences if the library were able to subscribe to only one of the two. Survey questions were designed to ascertain not only the participants' overall preference, but to provide detailed information to the library staff concerning the basis of this preference, including ease of access and use and the relative value of the two products in the students' didactic and clinical years. ClinicalKey is a new product launched by Elsevier in April 2012. It brings together the content from a number of Elsevier's medically related products, including MD Consult, First Consult, Procedures Consult, over 500 clinical journals, and more than 950 medical electronic books. It is being marketed to physicians as “Faster, more relevant clinical answers, so you can spend less time searching and more time caring for patients,” in an apparent attempt to compete with UpToDate as a point-of-care clinical tool. UpToDate is a point-of-care physician evidence/decision tool developed in 1992. In 2008, it was purchased by Wolters Kluwer, a large global information services and publishing company. It provides detailed, clinically related information written by physicians for physicians to use in clinical settings. It has been heavily marketed directly to physicians and is considered by many physicians as the key evidence-based, point-of-care online tool. There have been numerous studies on the value of UpToDate in clinical settings 1–5. This brief communication adds to this literature by presenting the results of a side-by-side trial of these two products based on reports by undergraduate medical students and their faculty.