PubMed Health

From WikiMD's Wellness Encyclopedia

PubMed Health
Type of site
Health information repository
Available inEnglish
OwnerNational Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI)
CommercialNo
RegistrationOptional

[[Category:Pages using infobox website with unknown parameters |current statusPubMed Health]]


PubMed Health was a free online resource that provided information on the prevention and treatment of diseases and conditions. It was a service provided by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), a branch of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). PubMed Health specialized in reviews of clinical effectiveness research, with easy-to-read summaries for consumers as well as full technical reports. Clinical effectiveness research finds answers to the question "What works?" in medical and health care.

Overview[edit | edit source]

PubMed Health aimed to help users find the evidence that could answer their questions about the effects of health care and to inform decisions about treatment, prevention, and planning for health care. It included content from systematic reviews and other summaries from organizations such as the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), the Cochrane Collaboration, and others. It also provided a database of clinical effectiveness research, including summaries and full texts.

Content and Features[edit | edit source]

The main features of PubMed Health included:

  • Systematic reviews of clinical trials, which are studies where people are randomly assigned to one of two or more treatment conditions.
  • Information about the methodology of systematic reviews.
  • Consumer-friendly summaries of systematic reviews.
  • Advanced search options tailored to finding systematic reviews and health information.

Discontinuation[edit | edit source]

In October 2018, PubMed Health was discontinued. Its functions and content were integrated into other NCBI resources, primarily PubMed, which is a larger and more comprehensive database of biomedical literature. The decision to discontinue PubMed Health was part of a broader strategy to consolidate similar resources and eliminate redundancy, thereby improving the efficiency and accessibility of health information provided by the NIH.

See Also[edit | edit source]



Contributors: Prab R. Tumpati, MD