Opinion: Clinical problems: Finding online solutions

Our role here at Contemporary OB/GYN is to offer these kinds of solutions for your practice, and ones with an affordable price tag. Since 1973, this journal has offered timely clinical reviews, relevant news, and roundtable discussions. And within the last few years, we've endeavored to take medical education into the digital age by building what we hope is a clinician-friendly Web site. With the recent introduction of http://ModernMedicine.com/, a "supersite" that includes the entire family of life science journals at Advanstar Communications, we believe we can offer you several additional tools to solve your day-to-day clinical problems.

Searching the Web while taking out the trash

Sometimes the information you need can't be found in a database or you want to discuss a complex case or tell other ob/gyns about a great case. A second useful Web-based tool-Sermo-lets you do just that. Sermo is made up of over 50,000 practicing physicians who exchange clinical insights and opinions in real time. Physicians participating in Sermo discuss new clinical findings, report unusual events, and work together to improve patient care. Now, through a partnership with this online community, ModernMedicine users will be able to discuss our journal articles directly on Sermo, learning from and sharing their experience with this community and forging new professional relationships.

Online practice management tools

Of course, solving challenging clinical problems is only half the battle for most practicing ob/gyns. There's also the business side of medicine to contend with. In print, Contemporary OB/GYN has been paying more attention to these issues by regularly presenting outstanding articles from Medical Economics. The next logical step is to offer clinicians some practical online business tools. The Coding Counselor, for instance, offers a database that lets you search for relevant ICD-9 codes. A search for postpartum hemorrhage, for example, revealed several 666 codes, including 666.02, "Third-stage postpartum hemorrhage, delivered, with mention of postpartum complication. 666.2 refers to delayed and secondary PPH, and 666.34 codes for "postpartum coagulation defect, postpartum defect or complication."