Mary Shah, MLS AHIP
Health Sciences Librarian & Archivist 
McGraw Center for Advanced Learning  
Norwalk Hospital, Nuvance Health 

This is an update of my review of AccessEmergency Medicine, which was published in the October 2019 issue of Doody’s Collection Development Monthly. You can find the original review here.  

AccessEmergency Medicine remains an accessible and immediate centralized platform for information on diagnosis and treatment of a spectrum of issues faced in the emergency department. Medical students will find resources for success in their clerkship; residents will appreciate the videos, self-assessment tools, and leading textbooks; and attending physicians – who remain the intended audience, though other healthcare professionals can benefit – will find the platform a solid resource.  

Content 

AccessEmergency Medicine contains many of the same features, including 20+ searchable textbooks and atlases, instructional videos, board review materials, an integrated drug database, thousands of full-color images, patient education handouts and information, and a clerkship corner for ease of use by medical students. A Quick Reference tab gives access to clinical reviews and an emergency medicine manual. Drug monographs can be searched by generic or trade names, as well as drug class. Case studies are divided by audience: “Which is Which?”, Case Files, and Resident Readiness^©: Emergency Medicine. Since the last review, multimedia content has been updated to include even more detailed emergency medicine and pediatric procedural videos designed to guide users through basic and advanced skills procedures, brief interventions, and applications of decision rules. The patient education resources are more customizable and now cover pediatric and adult patients, the acute setting, medications, and more languages. The Q & A section helps all levels of users with preparation for medical school exams to recertification for practicing physicians and pediatricians. 

Features/Functionality 

AccessEmergency Medicine still includes a review questions section of over 3,000 questions, a Study Tools section, and a “Tintinalli’s Necessary Takeaways” section that includes featured videos related to sections or chapters from Tintinalli’s Emergency Medicine: A Comprehensive Study Guide, 9th edition, Tintinalli et al. (McGraw-Hill, 2020).  

Books can be browsed by title or topic. The latest editions of leading McGraw Hill emergency medicine textbooks are easily accessible. The older editions are in a separate section and are clearly marked as archived with a link at the top of each title to the newer edition. Basic search is available, but there is no longer an advanced search option. This will not be a problem for many users, but the platform does not recognize “OR” or “NOT” as Boolean operators in the search field. Search results are ranked by a combination of tagging and keywords.  

AccessEmergency Medicine continues to interact with other McGraw Hill Medical resources, such as AccessSurgery, AccessMedicine, and more. 

Business Model 

The business model has not changed since the previous review. The interface is clean and the material is portable and accessible on any device once a user creates an account on the site of a subscribing institution. Individual subscriptions are still available, either on an annual ($595) or pay-per-view basis ($34.95 for 24-hour access or $54.95 for 48-hour basis). It is also possible for an individual to pay for annual access to the main resource (Tintinalli’s Emergency Medicine) for $249. The platform supports a variety of teaching strategies: traditional, integrated, case-based, and problem-based, as well as the flipped classroom. Statistics of institutional subscribers are easily accessible to library administrators. One can see the number of uses by edition and resource as well as the number of searches. 

Breakthrough 

Not just for universities, AccessEmergency Medicine is still a platform that will be of great service for teaching hospitals, academic medical centers, and health networks with rotating medical students, residents, and fellows, as well as practicing physicians and advanced practice health professionals. 

Conflict of interest: Mary Shah has no conflict of interest in reviewing the AccessEmergency database. Nuvance Health East (formerly known as Western Connecticut Health Network) has subscriptions with unlimited users to McGraw Hill Medical platforms AccessEmergency Medicine, AccessMedicine, and AccessSurgery.