Rx Perspective
Put the Internet to Work for You
The Web offers a variety of efficient ways to stay current.
COORDINATED BY PAUL N. SCHACKNOW, M.D., PH.D.

Your patients are definitely using the Internet to gather information about ophthalmic pharmaceuticals. They've been gathering information on all aspects of health care in cyberspace for some time. You can also use the Internet as a convenient way to gather timely information for yourself.

PLACES TO LOOK

All of the major eyecare drug companies now have Web sites that provide information for you and your patients. Some sites are little more than exercises in press relations, containing hardly more information than FDA package inserts. But others provide up-to-date FAQ (frequently asked questions) subsections with detailed answers often found only at CME lectures.

Some Web sites provide PowerPoint slide presentations that you can download and study at home, and others have collections of ophthalmic images that you can use when designing presentations for other ophthalmologists or primary care physicians. Here are some sites to check out:

• Alcon
  www.alconlabs.com
• Allergan
  www.allergan.com
• Bausch and Lomb
  www.bausch.com
• Merck
  www.merck.com
• Novartis
  www.novartisophthalmics.com
• Pharmacia
  www.xalatan.com
• Santen
   www.santen-inc.com

Don't forget to check out both the professional and the consumer sections of each site. You'll want to know what information your patients are seeing. Also, you'll see that links on some sites lead you to secondary sites devoted to specific products.

STAYING ABREAST OF RESEARCH

To stay on top of the latest research, you may be asking your local hospital librarian to look up pharmaceutical articles through MEDLINE. This probably works fine, but you should be able to accomplish searches more efficiently on your own.

MEDLINE searches used to be available only through expensive subscriptions, but are now obtainable through several online sources for free. Additionally, many services have new interfaces so that you no longer have to have a degree in library science to use the search engine effectively.

I've found the best free version of MEDLINE at www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed. Instructions are provided at the site. You can obtain free journal abstracts by typing in the name of the medication you're researching. Full text downloads are available for a small fee.

You can access abstracts and, in some cases, full text articles from major medical journals on the Web. For example, you can find the American Journal of Ophthalmology at www.ajo.com. For more general medical information consider accessing the New England Journal of Medicine at www.nejm.com.

ORGANIZATIONS AND MEETINGS

The Internet is also a great place to register for scientific meetings and download paper abstracts from a number of Web sites. Two of the best are the American Academy of Ophthalmology (AAO) at www.aao.org and the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology at www.arvo.org. The AAO site also has a hyperlinked list of state society sites and e-mail addresses.

Subspecialty interest groups also have Web sites. Examples include the American Glaucoma Society at www.glaucomaweb.org, the American Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgery at www.ascrs.org and the Vitreous Society at www.vitreoussociety.org.

TRACKING BREAKING NEWS

As you know, many patients bring us newspaper clippings that tout newly released drugs or study data. Several Internet search engines will allow you to stay on top of such developments.

In a number of recent computer magazine studies, the search engine at www.google.com rated highly for calling up complete and relevant information with appropriate key-word input. I've found another good one to be www.alltheweb.com. While these are helpful, trying to go through several search engines one at a time can be a chore. Therefore, consider using a meta-search engine to check several sources simultaneously. Two good examples of these resources are www.websearch.about.com and www.multimeta.com.

To do an even more exhaustive check of the Web, consider downloading a product like Copernic 2001. Copernic comes in both free and moderately priced versions. You can find both at www.copernic.com. Copernic makes simultaneous searches of all major Web sites a snap. The free version is excellent; so only upgrade if you need some advanced features.

Finally, a great deal of breaking information from the pharmaceutical industry can be found at the Web sites that report financial news. For example, you can go to the Intuit-Quicken news site at www.quicken.com/investments/news_center and type in a stock symbol for any of the pharmaceutical companies. (If you don't know the stock symbol, you can look it up on the site.) You'll get a list of the latest headlines reported in the financial press for that company. You can then click on the hyperlink to obtain details.

DON'T BE LEFT BEHIND

The Internet is a smart way to keep up with the latest news and research on ophthalmic pharmaceuticals. Your patients have already figured that out, so it's in your best interest and theirs for you to put the Internet to work for you as well. 

Dr. Schacknow, coordinator of Rx Perspective, is Chief of Glaucoma Services at Visual Health & Surgical Center in Lake Worth, Fla. He specializes in the medical, laser and surgical treatment of glaucoma. He is addicted to playing with his home computer and surfing the Internet. His Web site is www.glaucoma.eyemd.org.