Stay up to date with health information resources at CMU Libraries
The U.S. Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, through the Department of Health and Human Services, recognizes National Health Observances (NHOs) each month to raise awareness and improve the health of citizens across the country. October is no exception. Although October is widely recognized as National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, it features another observation that, while lesser known, is also very important: Health Literacy Month.
Health literacy is considered a foundational goal of the Healthy People 2030 initiative, and part of that effort is to ensure people can discover, evaluate, and apply information to help inform their healthcare decisions. With so much health information (and misinformation) available online, having that information vetted and verified by experts is incredibly important in decisions that, very literally, could be life or death. Using information that's gone through several stages of review is part of what's known as evidence-based practice. Health information is based on scientific evidence, using results from many controlled clinical trials and studies, which helps reduce the bias of using a single experience or anecdote. It's great to know what helped one person's health, but it is better to know that intervention worked for thousands of other people, too.
In support of the Colleges of Medicine and Health Professions, the CMU Libraries feature outstanding resources that provide health information on many levels for our users, including:
- Journal article databases such as the Cochrane Library or CINAHL
- Ebook collections, such as STAT!Ref and the R2 Digital Library
- Online portals, such as Access Medicine (McGraw-Hill), Clinical Key (Elsevier), and the LWW Health Library (Lippincott/Wolters Kluwer)
These portals provide textbooks and articles, images and procedure videos, and patient education information. The patient education content is shared in informational packets, which are very useful for people seeking to better understand their health and the health of their loved ones. For our health professions and medical students, using our resources not only helps them be more health literate themselves but also prepares them to improve the health literacy of the patients they will see and work alongside throughout their professional careers.
In July 2024, the CMU Libraries was pleased to announce a new addition to its health information tools: the evidence-based clinical tool UptoDate. This resource has long been requested by students in the College of Medicine. Published by Wolters-Kluwer, UptoDate allows users to search and access information on patients, medications, and clinical topics. UptoDate is used by millions of healthcare professionals around the world in hospitals, clinics, and offices. Have you ever gone to your doctor and left with handouts with additional information about your care? Chances are those handouts came from Up to Date! But where is that information coming from, exactly?
UptoDate uses scientific results as the basis of its evidence-based information. This evidence comes from published medical literature in peer-reviewed journals and clinical trial databases. However, UptoDate doesn't simply post each study's results. Clinical experts in each area grade the information. For transparency, each topic area in UptoDate lists the authors and editors by name, along with their educational degrees. These names are hyperlinked to a webpage with more information about each person's credentials. Each topic lists the current date of its literature review and when the information was last updated.
The system the experts use to make recommendations from the evidence is called GRADE. The quality of the evidence, that is, of each of the published studies and clinical trials, is graded according to factors such as risk of bias and consistency of results. The options for grading each study are high (Grade A), moderate, (Grade B), or low (Grade C). The reviewers then make an overall recommendation, strong (Grade 1) or weak (Grade 2). You can read more about the UptoDate use of GRADE if interested.
While very clinical search terms can be used by health professionals, UptoDate also allows users to search by symptoms, commercial drug names, or common names of likely diagnoses such as "strep throat." The results can be filtered by Adult or Pediatric patients, and users can go directly to images or patient education information – the packet you take away after visiting a physician. These patient education handouts are available in over a dozen languages and dialects.
UptoDate also contains a large library of calculators for health professionals to use in practice with patients. These include some commonly known calculators, such as the Apgar score for newborn babies and body mass indexes (BMI), as well as a wealth of in-depth risk assessments, scores, and percentiles. These calculators are an objective way to help healthcare practitioners estimate your disease risk and likely health outcomes. They also help convert units with which people may not be familiar. If someone from the UK says they would like to "lose about 2 stone", the calculator in UptoDate can translate that to about 13 kilograms, or 28 pounds.
By having early access to UptoDate in their academic careers, CMU health and medical students who move on to work in healthcare settings will now have experience with the clinical tool they will likely use in their daily work. With help from CMU Libraries and all the tools we provide, our users are well on their way to increasing their health literacy and maintaining good health at the University and beyond.