If you’re like most physicians, you spend an average of 1 or 2 hours a week reading medical literature, but wish you had time for more. We can’t add more minutes to an hour, but as of this issue, we’ve added Fast Track, to help you quickly find what you’re looking for in OBG Management.
Physicians read the medical literature carefully in order to offer patients the best care available. We rightly expect a journal to inform us of valid new information we can put into use. Information itself may be of use, however, but it is usable only if we can consume it in the context of a busy day.
Fast Track is designed to make reading easy. These succinct summaries of the “must know” ideas are placed in the margin near the text where you can find more detail, if you want to stop and delve.
By scanning the Fast Tracks, you can easily spot where to read more on the topics of greatest interest to you, and quickly choose what to skim, skip, scrutinize, and save. For the articles you read thoroughly, Fast Track is a quick recap.
To get a sense of the value of Fast Track, try flipping through this issue, reading each of the Fast Track items. Allow about 7 minutes cover to cover. In just a few minutes, you will have a good understanding of the essential points in each article.
If Fast Track seems familiar, perhaps it’s because it is patterned after the traditional “scholar’s margin” in textbooks, where a précis summarizes the main ideas, leaving space to jot down notes.
Your #1 request: Brevity
We send surveys to OBG Management readers frequently, to assess your learning interests and to understand how you evaluate published articles. The word you write on the forms far more than any other? “Concise”—whether as a compliment or a suggestion.
A major goal of OBG Management is to be both an advocate for practicing Ob/Gyns and a trusted source of information you can use, in every sense of the word. We hope Fast Track makes your time with OBG Management more useful.
We encourage you to send us your thoughts and suggestions. We are always interested in hearing from you.