Internet for Health Professionals

Introduction

Why connect
to the Internet?

What is on the
Internet?

Evaluating Web Resouces

Finding what
you want

Encyclopedic Sites

Pathfinder Sites

Search
engines

Subject
Catalogues

Evaluated
Subject
Catalogues

Interactive
Learning

There are a growing number of evaluated subject catalogues that have been compiled by individuals who are cognizant of the needs of health professionals.

Summary of evaluated subject catalogues

For a good overview and introduction to evaluated sources of medical information, use the Medical Matrix.

If you wish to identify specific documents, rather than resources of a more general nature, use CliniWeb.

To identify high-quality resources for the professions allied to medicine (nursing, physical therapy, etc.) and for the interdisciplinary sciences (minority health, alternative medicine, etc.) use HealthWeb.

Strengths of evaluated subject catalogues

As the resources are evaluated by professionals before they are included in the subject catalogue, highly relevant and qualitative sources of information can be identified quickly.

The short descriptions that accompany most resource entries enable you to decide in advance whether or not a particular site will provide the information you require.

Medical Matrix
http://www.medmatrix.org/

This site has a hierarchical list of subject headings. This is an excellent site for keeping up-to-date with new health-related Internet resources. Simply follow the link under the "What's New?" heading.

OMNI (Organized Medical Network)
http://www.omni.ac.uk

This site is the UK equivalent of Medical Matrix. Worth noting is the fact that the indexing thesaurus used by ONMI is the National Library of Medicine's Medical Subject Headings (MeSH).

CliniWeb
http://www.ohsu.edu/cliniweb/

This resource allows physicians and clinicians to search for information by subject and differs from Medical Matrix and OMNI in that it indexes information at the level of individual pages on the World Wide Web. To facilitate finding relevant Web pages, CliniWeb employs a program called SAPHIRE that maps free-text, natural language terms, to the correct MeSH term.

HealthWeb
http://healthweb.org/index.html

Provides organized access to health related Internet accessible resources.

Medsite Navigator
http://www.MedsiteNavigator.com/index.html

Provides a guide to digital science and medicine resources with a focus on the combination of basic science and clinical medicine.

Thrive Online
http://www.thriveonline.com

Hardin Meta Directory
http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/hardin/md/index.htm

Medscape
http://www.medscape.com/

MedWeb
http://www.medweb.emory.edu/MedWeb/

HealthyWay - Sympatico
http://www1.sympatico.ca/Contents/Health/

eblast - Encyclopedia Britannica’s Internet Guide (Health & Medicine)
http://www.eblast.com/browse.html?HeadingUid=1332