Doctors are supposed to keep up with the latest information regarding medical research, but most of them have busy schedules that usually involve overtime among other things. In short, it is hard for some of them to keep up with news or medical advances, but there are a few possible solutions. The following are a few ways physicians can keep up with medical research.
Attending Conferences
Since doctors have hectic lives, it makes sense that vital research might go under the radar. A simple solution is to attend medical conferences as often as possible. These conferences help doctors stay up to date because they are built by a team of researchers who try to highlight the most important news regarding specific issues.
Conferences usually condense some of these studies or journal articles into small books that a doctor can read a little easier, and conferences do a good job of spotlighting some of the most important discoveries.
Online Journals
There was a time when doctors had to get their publications from subscription services to help them keep up with some of the research findings published throughout the world, but this is no longer the case. The internet has changed the way research is published, and you can take advantage of that.
What you have to do is make sure the online publication site that you use aggregates the most important journals around the world. There are many publications throughout a given year, and all of them will not pertain to your specialty. This is the reason why using a site like MedWorksMedia that weeds out inconsequential papers and categorizes each piece should make things easier for you.
Getting an Assistant
Some doctors have been able to keep up with publications a little better by simply hiring someone to handle this for them. The idea is to hire an assistant who understands medical publications and can help weed out some of the findings that are most vital for our practice. These are the articles you get to read, which should help cut down the amount of time you need to dedicate to research.
Keep in mind that it is important that you do your best to layout the kind of publications that your assistant should pay attention to. This should make sure you do not miss a particular article that might have been useful. Have a few articles that you care about and the kind of medical issues your practice focuses on.
Journal Meetings
Every meeting does not have to be a grandiose trip to a conference where hundreds of doctors are. Small practices could hold meetings with each other to talk and learn from each other. You can use this to keep up with research, too, by spreading the workload.
You should consider having every doctor in your office deal with a particular type of publications. This lessens the load for everyone in the office. Every doctor in your office can, at the end of the week or month, give a presentation teaching the rest of the team some of the latests updates that might affect the practice.
Of course, these are just a few ideas that may keep everyone in your practice up-to-date. Remember, do not beat yourself over the head if you miss a publication or two because many physicians do, but these tips should prevent that from happening so much.