Community Spotlight — why Read by QxMD has become my go-to app for medical research

We’ve been speaking to users to better understand how they use Read and what we can do to make it even better. We’ve had some fascinating conversations and wanted to share some of these examples with the wider Read community. Hopefully, it will inspire you to use Read in new and different ways. Today we’re sharing our conversation with Dr. Gabriel Guandalini a Geriatric Primary Care Physician from Brazil who uses Read’s ‘most read paper’ email alerts to improve outcomes for his patients.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

How did you discover Read by QxMD?

I first downloaded it years ago, when I was a student, I was just looking for a good calculator and then I started using it for other purposes. After QxMD joined with Medscape, I think it got even better. Now everything is integrated and I can find certain things through Medscape and certain things through QxMD.

In the past, when I was looking for good medical news articles, I used one of your competitors, UpToDate. All my professors taught me to use it. At the time, I had a subscription through my university and then through my residency program. However, after I graduated and finished residency, I couldn’t see the reason to pay such a high subscription fee when I could just use QxMD. It has everything I need, and it’s free.

Which Read features do you use to discover papers?

I mostly use it on my computer, on my phone I usually just use the app for the calculators. If I’m opening [Read] it’s normally through my email. For instance, I get an email alert for the most read geriatrics papers. I receive it at least once a week and these articles are normally the ones that I’m most interested in. For example, in the latest email there is a paper on my to-read list. It’s about the use of benzodiapizes.

Do you have any examples of papers you’ve found through Read that have impacted your practice?

I can’t recall the exact paper, but it discussed using empagliflozin/Jardiance in patients with end-stage renal disease and decreased kidney function. This article changed my practice because I used to think it was dangerous to use this type of drug in such patients, with reduced filtration rate. However, the article demonstrated its safety and that any rise in creatinine is temporary. Consequently, I started using these drugs more aggressively, and not only for patients with normal renal function. Now, they are among the drugs I use most in my day-to-day practice.

And have you noticed a difference in outcomes with your patients?

I’ve seen that my patients are having less hospitalizations and less complications, especially heart disease. Plus, now that I’m using it more and I’m using it in patients without diabetes that have heart failure, I am seeing an improvement in those patients too.

Do any other examples come to mind?

Another article that I have saved was about the cardiovascular benefits of coffee. It didn’t really change my practice but it was a very interesting topic to talk about with my patients.

Brazil is one of the top producers of coffee and our region is one of the top producers in Brazil. Most of my patients, especially the elderly, were involved with coffee production, at least once. So it was a nice topic to discuss with them. So, that one maybe didn’t change my practice, but it was a nice article for me, and for my patients.