Best Online Cardiology Resources You're Not Using: dave.md

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With all the content aggregators and other resources online that point users toward useful websites, it's hard to fathom how a site as well conceived and valuable as dave.md could remain so relatively unknown.

With all the content aggregators, specialized search engines, “best of” directories, and other resources online that point users toward useful websites and content, it’s hard to fathom how a site as well conceived and valuable as dave.md could remain so relatively unknown.

In case you haven’t stumbled across it yet while searching the Internet for clinical content on diabetes and cardiovascular disease, dave.md (the “dave” in the URL stands for Diabetes And Vascular Education) is a website created and designed to “increase the knowledge and understanding of the inter-relationships between diabetes and cardiovascular disease within the scientific and medical communities.” Specifically, the site was created as a response to the explosion in clinical journals, conferences, and other sources of information in the past decade. Editor in chief Dave Marso, MD, realized that too much information of potential use to clinicians and scientists involved in diabetes care and research was being published in too many forums for any one practitioner to be able to keep track of it all, much less assimilate it into any kind of coherent narrative.

Marso and several like-minded colleagues started dave.md in late 2005 to “to meet the clinical and scientific need for a single online destination where physicians and scientists can go to get related scientific, industry, and government news all centered on the macrovascular complications in people with and at risk of developing diabetes.”

The site takes a multidisciplinary approach, in keeping with the range of specialists involved with diabetes care. It also operates with a sense of urgency. From the beginning, the dave.md editors decided that the timely, rapid dissemination of clinically relevant information was the best way to serve their audience, striving to publish summaries of conference presentations, article abstracts, videos, PowerPoint presentations, and other content as soon as possible following the release of the source material.

Visitors to the dave.md website will find a vast collection of resources. The “Library” section alone offers hundreds of reviews of novel investigations from the peer-reviewed literature, slide sets containing data on diabetes and cardiovascular disease-related research, case studies, and commentary from experts, all organized into five main categories: basic science, coronary heart disease, epidemiology, risk factors, and vascular disease.

The “Studies” section features information about ongoing studies updated by the dave.md editorial staff. Click on “News” for articles, opinion, and analysis on “hot topics from government, industry, scientific journals, and global news wires.” “Resources” features a collection of expert video lectures (including an ongoing lecture series on hyperglycemia in the setting of acute coronary syndromes), slide sets useful as reference and teaching tools, reports, and more.

You need to visit dave.md and have a good look around to really get an appreciation for the quantity and quality of the resources it offers. It’s an excellent example of how the Internet can be used to collect focused content from a wide range of sources and organize it in such a way as to provide an excellent user experience for physicians and other healthcare professionals who need fast access to timely, relevant information on diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

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