Why Is Medicine’s Killer App an E-textbook?

If you walk the floors the nation’s leading hospitals, chances are you’ll see a number of physicians hunched over computers, busily pecking away.  Look closer, and you’ll see that many are probably using an application called UpToDate, a for-profit platform that provides doctors timely (up-to-date – get it?), authoritative information on a wide range of medical conditions, written and edited by an expansive team of experienced clinicians, many associated with top-tier academic medical centers.

Fundamentally, UpToDate is an electronic textbook, incorporating a minimal amount of technology that enables rapid cross-referencing and frequent online updates.  These two features, together with consistently high-quality content, have enabled  UpToDate to render the classic medicine textbooks effectively obsolete; if you are a physician, and you want to look up a medical condition, odds are the first place you’ll look is UpToDate...

...The popularity of UpToDate offers a window into how physicians currently view and value information...While the idea of using a medical textbook to guide clinical decision making does not strike most physicians as a particularly radical idea, it’s useful to consider alternative approaches that are not generally used.  For instance, you might imagine an open source textbook, perhaps analogous to Wikipedia, that could have emerged as the reference of choice; or you could envision (as many have) an information system that told physicians how their peers were actually treating other patients in similar situations, or how other patients actually fared in response to different treatment approaches...