PubMed enhancements: fulfilling the promise of a great product.

There have been many recent changes to PubMed to enhance its usefulness. Those changes include: LinkOut Libraries (local holding field), PubMed Central (full-text articles archived by the National Library of Medicine), and LinkOut (access to full-text articles right from the PubMed citation). Medical librarians should be aware of how these features work to best assist their clients.

Using PDAs during the internal medicine clerkship.

In 2000, an Institute of Medicine Report stated that there are 99,000 deaths in hospitals each year due to medical errors. Many options have been tried to improve systems and practice patterns, but they have proven to be too cumbersome to be workable and were not accepted by physicians. We conducted a study of 19 third-year medical students (12 males, 7 females) at the West Virginia University School of Medicine, Charleston Division, during their eight-week clerkship in 2002 to determine whether providing them patient information at bedside with Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) would be valuable.