There would be very few clinicians around New Zealand who have not heard of Medscape.

This comprehensive medical information website has expanded over the past five years and now includes a wide range of dedicated medical specialty pages.

The site is designed to appeal to an extensive range of clinicians from the highly tuned super sub-specialist all the way up the ladder to the perhaps slightly less finely tuned super generalist (the GP).

For the last six years, Medscape has also established its own exclusively electronic peer reviewed general medical journal MedGenMed.

This dedicated e-journal has also been on Medline since 2000 and follows the same basic publication rules as the Vancouver Group of medical journal editors.

Site content includes a wide range of features. The most notable is Medscape Today (which is regularly updated medical news of the week style format); a Newsletter section (see below) and also a link to the ACP Journal (the separate subscription-only print and e-journal published by the American College of Physicians).

Specialty pages

Medscape has been developing its specialty pages over the last few years. Not that long ago scant pages were dedicated to women's health - most notably obstetrics (and particularly generalist obstetrics), but these omissions have now been partly remedied.

The primary care specialty page can be set up with the proverbial click-of-the-mouse as indeed can all the 32 specialties.

The homepage has quick links to other specialty pages which have been determined as relevant and this includes paediatrics, obstetrics and gynaecology, and women's health. As expected the family medicine/primary care specialty site cannot be fully comprehensive.

The advantage of sites such as Medscape is that the high quality editorial selection protocols ensure only articles which are perceived as clinically relevant are covered.

The important route to the other specialties is perhaps a little camouflaged and is buried within a small menu-box headed Other Specialty Homepages beside the Welcome Dr Bloggs banner.

An improvement in Medscape's appeal to GPs might perhaps be to have the ability to merge a few specialty sub-pages into, or within the Primary Care homepage.

CME section

The CME service includes CME activity tracking systems and offers free, continuously updated continuing education activities for physicians.

These activities have been comprehensively developed under the protocols of the appropriately accredited educational organisations.

The CME section initially appears a little complex. However, a closer look into the CME Section for primary care is interesting and there are excellent links to journals (Journal CME), including those elusive, full text articles.

In this case the journal articles have been processed into HTML format for Medscape (PDF copies are not on offer) but are otherwise complete.

Articles are also integrated in a timely fashion with editorially prepared CME tests.

The section includes a range of components apart from Journal CME. There is also Professional Education (from the CME editors), CME Circle (from their educational partners such as WebMD) and News CME (from Medscape Medical News).

The CME service includes CME activity tracking systems and offers free, continuously updated continuing education activities for physicians (and other health professionals).

These activities have been comprehensively developed under the protocols of the appropriately accredited educational organisations.

Library Section

The Journals and Reference section is a little disappointing and only includes a short list of free full-text journals, most of which are well known as freely accessible. It is clearly hard to beat the superb library offered by the sponsored MerckMedicus, which was reviewed in New Zealand Doctor l0 August 2005. It provides access to a remarkably wide range of excellent and up to date texts.
Email newsletters

For email addicts there is the capacity to sign on for any number of the regular newsletters covering breaking conference news, Medscape Best Evidence, CME alerts and MedPulse from within each of the 32 specialties.
That would make around 120 weekly newsletters in all. All we need is a week off every month to catch up with all this stuff...