Lettura Magistrale

Teledermatologia - il mondo della dermatologia sul mio PC
H. Peter Soyer
Department of Dermatology, Medical University of Graz, Graz, Austria

The new era of Information Technology is changing also the microcosmos of dermatology considerably. Technology drives globalization and in turn is driven by globalization. And health is one of the major topics profiting from both, technology and globalization. Medical knowledge can only be increased when shared and thus the digital divide is a key factor for the progress in medicine in general and in dermatology in particular. The electronic revolution provides physicians and health workers with unprecedented access to information. A few of these new worlds, which have impact also for dermatology, available for free on the Internet are the theme of this lecture.

MEDLINE & PubMed

MEDLINE (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/factsheets/medline.html) is the primary component of PubMed (http://pubmed.gov); a link to PubMed is found on the NLM home page at http://www.nlm.nih.gov. The result of a MEDLINE/PubMed search is a list of citations (including authors, title, source, and often an abstract) to journal articles and an indication of free electronic full-text availability. Searching is free of charge and does not require registration.

OMIM

Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=OMIM) is a catalog of human genes and genetic disorders authored and edited by Dr. Victor A. McKusick and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins and elsewhere, and developed for the World Wide Web by NCBI, the National Center for Biotechnology Information.

Dermis.Net

Dermis.Net (http://www.dermis.net/index_e.html) is the largest dermatology information service available on the internet. It offers elaborate image atlases complete with diagnoses and differential diagnoses, case reports and additional information on almost all skin diseases.

Telederm.org

telederm.org (www.telederm.org) is a web application for medical students, physicians and healthcare workers interested in dermatology with the goal to facilitate the on-line discussion of interesting and unusual cases in clinical dermatology and dermatopathology. In the spirit of open-access teleconsultation every user can easily seek diagnostic advice from a pool of other users willing to share their knowledge, some of whom might have more experience in a particular clinical setting. This open access structure encourages reciprocal exchange: simply by using the multi-hub facilities of the Internet, a colleague seeking help in one instance may later have the opportunity to provide expert help in another instance.