About a month ago I had the opportunity to try out a new Ovid product called Nursing@Ovid (N@O). N@O's primary users are the nurses on the floor, who need answers to everyday (and maybe not so everyday) clinical questions. N@O is designed so that it can search three or more portals (additional databases) and Ovid's Nursing Collection (books and journals) at one time, similar to a universal search engine. These portals (databases) do not have to be Ovid owned databases. Therefore, libraries can add CINAHL, PubMed, Proquest’s Nursing & Allied Health Source, etc. as portals to N@O. The ability to search three portals at one time is standard, the option to add additional portals beyond the three costs extra. You can even add Amazon.com as a portal but since it is a nursing resource it would probably behoove you to stick with nursing and medically related databases.

N@O is on the OvidSP platform, meaning users have the ability to search using OvidSP's Basic or Advanced Search. The Basic search uses OvidSP's natural language processing. As a librarian I find Basic Search a little too basic, but doing a simple keyword search on wound care brought up several very relevant articles which would be helpful to a nurse who needs one or two quick articles for the moment while on the floor.

The Advanced Search is the same advanced search that many librarians prefer. Librarians normally would find Advanced Search more to their liking, but they need to be aware if they are searching multiple databases in the Advanced Search the indexing and field searching can vary according to what portals (databases) are being searched. Searchers should be aware of the other portal's indexing, tree structures (if it has one) and searchable fields because N@O will try and search using that information. But if the portal doesn't have the relevant searchable field then N@O will do a keyword search.
For example: Amazon.com doesn't have medical subject headings as a searchable field in their database. If you are doing MeSH field search and Amazon.com is one of your portals, it will do something similar to a keyword search. Ovid's N@O does deal with external indexes (the portal database's indexes), however if a portal database has a very dissimilar thesaurus, it may difficult do a good subject search. The closer the portal database's thesaurus structure is to N@O's thesaurus the better the subject searching results. Another reason to try and stay with nursing and medical databases as portals.

The results are displayed similar to the way many other OvidSP databases display results. The left hand side offers other methods for nurses to narrow results down to needed information. Nurses can narrow search results down to patient education, care plans, guidelines, etc. Ovid's N@O has some actual care plans as well as material about care plans, and users clicking on the term "care plan" will get both types of information. Currently, there is more material about care plans rather than the actual care plans, however Ovid is aware of this issue and is working to address it for their next release. Because the actual care plans and patient education information are listed in the results together with articles/chapters about care plans and patient education, I think it would be helpful for there to be a distinction between the actual care plans, patient education information, etc and articles/chapters about those things. Such a distinction whether it is an icon or wording, would allow busy nurses on the floor to easily select the appropriate results with less confusion.

If an institution subscribes to Clini-eguide, the N@O display also features a tab at the top of search area enabling the user to search Clini-eguide. However, when the user clicks on the tab the transition between N@O and Clini-eguide is a little awkward. The ability to search a product like Clini-guide, could be quite helpful and a powerful addition to N@O. Recently Wolters Kluwer just acquired UpToDate, it is unclear as to how this will impact or work with Clini-eguide. I remember sitting in on a presentation by the UpToDate reps who noted that almost 50% of the database usage was coming from nurses. Wolters Kluwer's acquisition of UpToDate, its impact on Clini-eguide and subsequent impact on N@O makes for an interesting evolution should Ovid still keep this feature available in N@O. If this feature is kept, my only suggestion would be to make the transition between Clini-eguide (or whatever it might morph into) and N@O more seamless. In an ideal world it would be nice for the results to displayed within the N@O platform.

It is helpful to know that Ovid is planning on a second update to N@O. It is my sincere hope they begin to add more unique content such as actual guidelines, care plans, and patient education information. I also would like to see them provide a quick and easy way for busy nurses to distinguish between these important aids and the articles/chapters about care plans or patient education. These two key improvements will make N@O even more of a needed resource on the floor rather than a universal search engine with nursing resources.

I look forward to the second update and if I am able to try it out I will write an update to Nursing@Ovid.

I am curious to those who have N@O, what do you like about it or don't like about it. How are your nurses using it? What kind of portals are you searching? Feel free to comment so that others can benefit from your insights.

Labels: CINAHL, Databases, Ovid