I just attended an MDConsult info meeting yesterday and I was very impressed with iConsult. It is a clinical decision support product that integrates clinical reference directly into your workflow applications, delivering evidence-based medical information at the point of care, in the Electronic Medical Record.

MDConsult has been working with various electronic medical record systems so that their product, iConsult provides instant access to information on diagnoses, therapy options, and patient education embedded in the EMR.

From the demonstration and what I could understand iConsult is the component that brings the FirstConsult information to the EMR.
What is FirstConsult? FirstConsult is a evidence based clinical information tool for health care providers.

It contains:

• Differential Diagnoses Files for rapid evaluation of presenting signs and symptoms, with interactive access to lists of over 1,500 potential diagnoses sorted by age and prevalence in primary care
• FIRSTConsult's Medical Conditions database presents consistently organized, regularly updated information on patient evaluation, diagnosis and treatment, tests, prevention and much more: each Medical Condition File is organized into 7 sections (Summary, Background, Diagnosis, Treatment, Outcomes, Prevention, Resources) and then into 55 topic headings, thereby providing access to over 20,000 disease-specific topics in total
• Procedure Files provide systematic guidance, in the form of text and video, on over 30 surgical and diagnostic procedures commonly performed in the office setting
• Reference Centers offer practical advice on topics that are not disease-specific, such as Bioterrorism, Pregnancy and Contraception
• Patient Education Files written in both English and Spanish

FirstConsult is seamlessly integrated with MDConsult. This allows health care providers to easily get more in depth information from the texts, journals, and practice guidelines within MDConsult.

So as you can see a hospital system that has iConsult working within in their EMR system, they have access to FirstConsult's clinical decision information at their finger tips within the patient's record, and they can get more in depth information seamlessly from MDConsult.

iConsult is still in beta testing but from what was demonstrated, it looks to be very promising. Already they have plans to update the second generation of iConsult with your hospital's formulary information and allow you to create and change your order sets.

This is huge! Of course this also involves other hospital departments more so than many library products. iConsult works within the EMR so this would mean that your IT people would/should/must be involved. There are many hospitals that are striving to get in to the electronic medical record in a big way, especially since President Bush spoke about it at the Cleveland Clinic. Obviously having three products like this might be too pricey for some smaller libraries. But who is to say that the library has to pay for the costs of all three products, involve other departments. This product is a part of the patient's EMR, so it effects multiple hospital departments and patient care, therefore multiple departments should/could help pay for it.

So go to your supervisor's, your IT people, whoever is in charge of your hospital's EMR campaign and inform them of iConsult.

For more information on iConsult, check out their home page http://www.clinicaldecisionsupport.com/. It contains a demo of iConsult within an EMR, technology information, and product information including information for healthcare organizations interested in joining there beta testing program.

For more information FirstConsult check out their home page http://www.firstconsult.com. It contains information on the already established product and also has information on what users are saying about FirstConsult, specifically an excerpt from the Journal of Family Practice: June 2004. Vol. 53, No. 6.