Thankfully, there are physicians in every specialty who make it their life’s work to monitor new clinical data, evaluate the quality of medical evidence and rank its strength accordingly. My colleagues, the physician-editors of DynaMed Plus, comprise one such group, and I discussed with them what advice we’d give to med students – and former med students who are now practicing physicians – to keep the barrage of new clinical data at bay and create processes to follow. In other words, what would our former selves benefit from knowing back when we were training?
We offer the following tips:
• Take small bites. Avoid reading any journal cover-to-cover—it’s too overwhelming, not very useful and most of the content will not be retained. Instead, subscribe to a core set of trusted journal abstracts, blogs and podcasts you can access on your computer and mobile device. Save lengthier, key articles to read later. The trick is to digest little bits of educational material when you have a few spare moments, such as between class time, waiting in a long Starbucks line, etc.
• Take notes. While reading, take notes using Evernote or another cloud-based archival service, like Google Drive. Use a trusted digital clinical reference tool to help verify information and critically appraise the evidence. When you read material that you feel will be useful in clinical care work, keep a running catalog of bedside pearls. The note-taking part is crucial: Writing or typing these helps solidify your learning.
• Question everything, #1. If something does not seem right, question its source and reliability. Your job is not to know everything, but to learn how to find, evaluate and use information.
• Question everything, #2. Never forget that the word “evidence” can mean different things to different people. To be truly evidence-based, study architects should describe how they choose which evidence to include; describe their process of critical appraisal; provide clinical answers without bias or speculation; provide levels of evidence; and offer transparency regarding intent, funding and outside influences.
• Make a personal connection. Work with faculty to learn how to put new evidence into proper perspective and apply it to individual clinical situations. Information is better retained when it’s associated with a specific patient. This is a correlate of “information just in time vs. information just in case.”
• Find trusted sources. Identify what kind of information you need first, and then determine what resources will trustworthily fulfill those needs. Once you’ve identified specific sources, teach yourself how to find information quickly within them. Use these resources regularly enough that you are comfortable with what they can do for you.
• Remember, your job is not to memorize everything. But your job is to find the information when you need it. When you learn how to find, evaluate and use information, you learn a critical skill important to being a great physician.
• It’s all in the attitude. Along those lines, accept that you will never reach the end of learning about medicine. You can help tackle FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) by being a diligent, lifelong learner and committing to learning a little bit every day.
These tips, by the way, can also be used by physicians. Let’s face it: Doctors are in a tough spot. Their schedules are jam-packed with patient appointments, each one a new diagnosis. There’s time pressure to see more patients in the same number of hours in the face of dwindling reimbursements, increasing compliance burdens and skyrocketing liability costs.
Putting some thought into filtering new clinical information will help save your wits for doing the thing you love most – practicing medicine – and will help you win the battle against information overload.
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