WebMD
Bing Health’s new additions make it a legitimate alternative to WebMD and Wikipedia for healthcare
Surely by now you have heard of Microsoft’s Bing search engine. Microsoft has been heavily advertising Bing through TV commercials, content deals, and even offering cash back deals via major vendors such as Best Buy, Walmart, and others. A few days ago Microsoft announced an upgrade to its Bing Health experience that medical professionals should definitely take note of – it could change the current landscape of how medical content is accessed and shared with patients.
What makes Bing Health’s experience so valuable is they aggregate data, much like Wikipedia does, but only from legitimate medical sources. Later in this article I’ll go through an example using sarcoidosis as the search term and compare it to Wikipedia and WebMD – then explain how the data can be used with patients.
WebMD launches Medscape App [App Review]
WebMD has launched a new app directed towards health care providers. Medscape is a free app and was launched a few days ago. I like this app because of it’s speed. It’s great for looking up med dosages (adult vs. peds, etc), interactions, and pricing. If you’d rather not wait a few extra seconds for Epocrates to load in order to look up a simple drug dosage, then you should try this app. I found the user interface to be nice and quick.
Medscape has a CME section and a medical news section, which I didn’t find as useful. There is also a section where you can look up nearby hospitals, physicians, and pharmacies. The only downside I could find for this app is they ask for you name, email address, etc before you can use it. I fudged most of that information though and it took me just a few minutes to set up. Medscape has a nice interactive website set up here.
