MedlinePlus

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MedlinePlus is an online information service produced by the United States National Library of Medicine. The service provides curated consumer health information in English and Spanish with select content in additional languages. [1] [2] The site brings together information from the National Library of Medicine (NLM), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), other U.S. government agencies, and health-related organizations. There is also a site optimized for display on mobile devices, in both English and Spanish. In 2015, about 400 million people from around the world used MedlinePlus. [3] The service is funded by the NLM and is free to users.

Contents

MedlinePlus provides encyclopedic information on health and drug issues, and provides a directory of medical services. MedlinePlus Connect links patients or providers in electronic health record (EHR) systems to related MedlinePlus information on conditions or medications.

PubMed Health was another NLM site that offered consumer health information, in addition to information for health professionals. However, "PubMed Health, a portal for systematic reviews as well as consumer health information, was discontinued on October 31, 2018. The same or similar content is being provided through other NLM resources, namely PubMed and Bookshelf (for systematic review content), and MedlinePlus (for consumer health information)." [4]

History

The National Library of Medicine has long provided programs and services for professional medical scientists and health care providers, including MEDLINE and the various services that access it, such as PubMed and Entrez. By the 1990s, more members of the general public were using these services as Internet access became widespread. [5] But nonprofessional users could benefit from reliable health information in a layperson-accessible format. [6] [7] [8] The National Library of Medicine introduced MedlinePlus in October 1998, to provide a non-commercial online service similar, for example, to the commercial WebMD. In 2010 another NCBI service, PubMed Health, complemented MedlinePlus in offering curated consumer health information; PubMed Health focuses especially on finding information about clinical effectiveness of treatments. [9]

MedlinePlus initially provided 22 health topics in English, which expanded to almost 1000 health topics in English and Spanish, plus links to health information in over 40 languages. MedlinePlus was recognized by the Medical Library Association for its role in providing health information. [10] The site scored 84 in the American Customer Satisfaction Index for 2010. [11]

In 2000s, A.D.A.M.'s medical encyclopedia was incorporated into MedlinePlus. The "Animated Dissection of Anatomy for Medicine, Inc." is a NASDAQ-traded public company based in Atlanta, Georgia, that provides consumer health information and benefits technology products to healthcare organizations, employers, consumers, and educational institutions.

Key features

The MedlinePlus website provides information in text-based webpages as well as in videos and tools. [12] [13] Other ways to access to access MedlinePlus content include MedlinePlus Mobile, which is a point-of-care tool for clinicians, and MedlinePlus Connect, [14] which connects to Electronic Health Records (EHRs). [12]

Related Research Articles

MEDLINE is a bibliographic database of life sciences and biomedical information. It includes bibliographic information for articles from academic journals covering medicine, nursing, pharmacy, dentistry, veterinary medicine, and health care. MEDLINE also covers much of the literature in biology and biochemistry, as well as fields such as molecular evolution.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">United States National Library of Medicine</span> Worlds largest medical library

The United States National Library of Medicine (NLM), operated by the United States federal government, is the world's largest medical library.

PubMed is a free search engine accessing primarily the MEDLINE database of references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics. The United States National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health maintain the database as part of the Entrez system of information retrieval.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Entrez</span> Cross-database search engine for health sciences

The Entrez Global Query Cross-Database Search System is a federated search engine, or web portal that allows users to search many discrete health sciences databases at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) website. The NCBI is a part of the National Library of Medicine (NLM), which is itself a department of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which in turn is a part of the United States Department of Health and Human Services. The name "Entrez" was chosen to reflect the spirit of welcoming the public to search the content available from the NLM.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Medical Subject Headings</span> Controlled vocabulary

Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) is a comprehensive controlled vocabulary for the purpose of indexing journal articles and books in the life sciences. It serves as a thesaurus that facilitates searching. Created and updated by the United States National Library of Medicine (NLM), it is used by the MEDLINE/PubMed article database and by NLM's catalog of book holdings. MeSH is also used by ClinicalTrials.gov registry to classify which diseases are studied by trials registered in ClinicalTrials.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Medical library</span> Library focused on medical information

A health or medical library is designed to assist physicians, health professionals, students, patients, consumers, medical researchers, and information specialists in finding health and scientific information to improve, update, assess, or evaluate health care. Medical libraries are typically found in hospitals, medical schools, private industry, and in medical or health associations. A typical health or medical library has access to MEDLINE, a range of electronic resources, print and digital journal collections, and print reference books. The influence of open access (OA) and free searching via Google and PubMed has a major impact on the way medical libraries operate.

PubMed Central (PMC) is a free digital repository that archives open access full-text scholarly articles that have been published in biomedical and life sciences journals. As one of the major research databases developed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), PubMed Central is more than a document repository. Submissions to PMC are indexed and formatted for enhanced metadata, medical ontology, and unique identifiers which enrich the XML structured data for each article. Content within PMC can be linked to other NCBI databases and accessed via Entrez search and retrieval systems, further enhancing the public's ability to discover, read and build upon its biomedical knowledge.

eMedicine is an online clinical medical knowledge base founded in 1996 by doctors Scott Plantz and Jonathan Adler, and computer engineer Jeffrey Berezin. The eMedicine website consists of approximately 6,800 medical topic review articles, each of which is associated with a clinical subspecialty "textbook". The knowledge base includes over 25,000 clinically multimedia files.

Index Medicus (IM) is a curated subset of MEDLINE, which is a bibliographic database of life science and biomedical science information, principally scientific journal articles. From 1879 to 2004, Index Medicus was a comprehensive bibliographic index of such articles in the form of a print index or its onscreen equivalent. Medical history experts have said of Index Medicus that it is “America's greatest contribution to medical knowledge.”

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First Databank (FDB) is a major provider of drug and medical device databases that help inform healthcare professionals to make decisions. FDB partners with information system developers to deliver useful medication- and medical device-related information to clinicians, business associates, and patients. FDB is part of Hearst and the Hearst Health network.

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References

  1. "Medlineplus.gov en español" (in Spanish). Archived from the original on 2020-05-07. Retrieved 2009-06-08.
  2. "Health Information in Multiple Languages: MedlinePlus". medlineplus.gov. Archived from the original on 2019-10-09. Retrieved 2019-10-22.
  3. "MedlinePlus Statistics". National Institutes of Health. Archived from the original on 2016-06-05. Retrieved 2016-05-08.
  4. National Library of Medicine, PubMed Health, archived from the original on 2018-10-18, retrieved 2017-09-04.
  5. Naomi Miller, M.L.S., Systems Librarian, Eve-Marie Lacroix, M.S., Chief, Public Services Division, and Joyce E. B. Backus, M.S.L.S., Systems Librarian (January 2000). "MEDLINEplus: building and maintaining the National Library of Medicine's consumer health Web service". Bulletin of the Medical Library Association (BMLA). 88 (1): 11–7. PMC   35193 . PMID   10658959.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  6. Marill JL, Miller N, Kitendaugh P (January 2006). "The MedlinePlus public user interface: studies of design challenges and opportunities". Journal of the Medical Library Association. 94 (1): 30–40. PMC   1324769 . PMID   16404467.
  7. Miller N, Lacroix EM, Backus J (Mar–Apr 2001). "The making of Medlineplus". Public Libraries. 40 (2): 111–3.
  8. Miller N, Tyler RJ, Backus JE (Fall 2004). "MedlinePlus: The National Library of Medicine brings quality information to health consumers" (PDF). Library Trends. 53 (2): 375–88. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2019-01-04. Retrieved 2009-06-08.
  9. Miles, Alisha (July 2011), "PubMed Health", Journal of the Medical Library Association, 99 (3): 265–266, doi:10.3163/1536-5050.99.3.018, PMC   3133896 .
  10. "Thomson Reuters/Frank Bradway Rogers Information Advancement Award". Medical Library Association. Archived from the original on 10 September 2017. Retrieved 5 August 2016.
  11. "ACSI Scores for U.S. Federal Government". The American Customer Satisfaction Index. 2010. Archived from the original on 2021-12-02. Retrieved 2011-10-04.
  12. 1 2 Schnall, Janet G.; Fowler, Susan (September 2013). "MedlinePlus.gov: quality health information for your patients". The American Journal of Nursing. 113 (9): 64–65. doi:10.1097/01.NAJ.0000434180.83352.f0. ISSN   1538-7488. PMID   23985609.
  13. "Videos & Tools: MedlinePlus". medlineplus.gov. Archived from the original on 2019-10-01. Retrieved 2019-10-22.
  14. "MedlinePlus Connect: Linking Patient Portals and Electronic Health Records to Health Information". medlineplus.gov. Archived from the original on 2019-10-09. Retrieved 2019-10-22.