Wladimir Labeikovsky, PhD 
Bioinformationist
Strauss Health Sciences Library
University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus 

This is an update of a review of GIDEON published in the October 2018 issue of Doody’s Collection Development Monthly. You can find the original review here.  

Content 

GIDEON is a reference database tool produced by GIDEON Informatics in the form of a website and ebook series purporting to offer up-to-date, relevant information to help in the diagnosis and treatment of patients presenting with symptoms of an infectious disease, particularly diseases that may be lesser known in the practitioner’s location. 

Features & Functionality  

The new version of GIDEON sports a fundamentally redesigned user interface with convenient additions to responsive design and accessibility. This change has made the GIDEON web app more usable in different settings and conditions as it now has better compatibility with a wider array of mobile devices. 

The structure of the web application has also changed, bringing more visibility to GIDEON diagnosis tools (see figures). This makes GIDEON less of a reference-only resource and more of a hybrid information and diagnosis tool more immediately usable by public health practitioners. The pathogen identification module now provides alternatives between the GIDEON “probability engine” (Bayes’ based ranked differential) and an interactive decision-tree method.  

Another new feature in GIDEON is a data visualization module. Users familiar with similar simple interactive tools for dataviz like Tableau will find it easy to make customizable charts based on GIDEON available data. 

In an important upgrade, GIDEON does not limit its information and features to the web application. The new version of GIDEON provides an API (https://api-doc.gideononline.com) that can be used by researchers and practitioners to build and build on customized tools that can mine the extensive GIDEON database. The API is well documented and based on REST principles, making it both versatile and accessible to researchers and practitioners with different development experience. 

Business Model & Breakthrough 

GIDEON continues to be available under individual and institutional subscriptions. The new features and API make it a more interesting offer for practitioners, researchers, and educational institutions.