An article in the Annals of Family Medicine 3:507-513 (2005) Physicians Answer More Clinical Questions and Change Clinical Decisions More Often With Synthesized Evidence: A Randomized Trial in Primary Care, evaluates DynaMed (Ebsco product) as a clinical decision tool.

As medinfo mentions, it is important to know that the two principle authors of the study Brian S. Alper and David S. White are involved with DynaMed. As the article's footnote indicates: Dr Alper is the founding principal of Dynamic Medical Information Systems, LLC, and the Editor-in-Chief of DynaMed. Dr White was employed by Dynamic Medical Information Systems, LLC, to conduct this research with funds from the National Science Foundation award but has not conducted efforts for or received monies from Dynamic Medical Information Systems, LLC, outside this grant award.

The study primarily looked at DynaMed effectiveness as a clinical decision tool for primary care physicians. In that sense the authors discovered that primary care physicians using DynaMed, were able to answer more questions and they changed clinical decisions more often, without increasing the overall search time.

While it is nice to see another product in the competition, this article only verifies that DynaMed is now a viable clinical decision tool for primary care. In fact the authors state, "Our study design could be adapted by changing allocation parameters to support head-to-head and multiple comparisons. Adding question classification items to data entry and conducting a larger study could allow determination of clinical reference performance specific to question types. That is what I would like to see (as well as other librarians), a comparison of DynaMed, FirstConsult, UpToDate, as well as other clinical decision products.

Let's have a Thunderdome study where many databases enter, but only one leaves. Ok that might be a little dramatic, but my point is let's get a comparison study that appropriately evaluates each product against each other.