Lit Review Updates from Team CiteMed

For years our team has suffered from my (ahem lackluster) color and design skills. Don’t get me wrong, our lit review tool worked great, and has reliably helped our writing staff crank out hundreds of reviews of the years.

But when we started piloting it with other companies, people were confused. They didn’t know where to go, or which screen did what.

‘Aesthetics aside, the design of your app becomes insanely important once people outside of your own circle start using it. It needs to be intuitive. Or people will give up and go back to excel.

With our writing team, we built it side by side over years. So everyone knew where everything was (even if the location didn't make any sense), and there were no issues.

But stick a brand new user on the platform, and they just didn’t know where to go. Sure, they could see the potential and usefulness when I whirled them through all the screens, but there was some serious resistance to getting their initial reviews done.

That was then, and today I’m proud to announce that we taken the feedback, done our homework, and spent months re-imagining CiteMed.io and how we can make it even more intuitive and simple.

I hired a top user experience and design firm, and after they were done tearing apart my original vision for the user flow (only a few tears were shed), we came up with something far more elegant.

The Two-Path Workflow

See our users can be broken down into two main categories.

The complexity loving power-user, and the ‘get it done’ user.

The power user loves their custom features. They don’t mind getting deep into the configuration and tweaking things to be just perfectly optimal for their review process. We all know (and love!) these folks. CiteMed was built by them after all, with lots of flexibility and a robust settings panel.

The other type of user doesn’t care about any of that. They want to get through their lit review (likely for MDR compliance) in the most straight-line manner possible. They are only concerned with what works, and what meets the latest regs. This is the other camp that works at CiteMed. Rigorous focus on simplicity, and stripping out necessary junk until you get to the absolutely most lean and functional ‘thing’ you were wanting.

At first they both seemed contradictory, how can we have some incredibly sophisticated (read complex) application that also is simple to use and just works for the people that don’t care about the bells and whistles?

The answer we ultimately found is in the two-stage workflow. Out of the virtual box you are dropped right on the simplest, compliant path for a great lit review. Just follow our yellow-brick road and at the end you’re review will be compliant.

But, at anytime, you can flip into the advanced mode and tinker with the underbelly of CiteMed as much as you want. Simple, to advanced, and back again. Or always simple, or always advanced. It doesn't matter to us as long as you’re getting the outputs you need.

Search Functionality

After a lot of conversations with customers, it become even more evident that our ability to automatically search and pull results from public databases was valuable. Everyone liked being able to plug in their terms and watch the results flood in form PubMed and PubMed Central. So we added more, and tried to make them run as consistently as possible.

Now you can search automatically from:

• PubMed
• PubMed Central
• Cochrane Library
• ClinicalTrials.gov
• FDA Maude
• Pubmed Europe
• Google Scholar

Turbo-Charged Abstract Review

There’s nothing more depressing than squinting at a spreadsheet with two thousand rows. Knowing you’re going to be clicking through every single one of them, and also knowing that you’ll likely accidentally paste in the wrong thing, modify a cell without noticing it, and generally cause problems for future you.

Our abstract review screens were designed to let you eat the elephant one bite at a time (is that analogy still politically correct?). Quickly include, exclude, or exclude with a custom comment all in the same place. Every action tracked for future validation needs and report building.

This is where the reviewer spends the most amount of time, so why not make it as efficient, easy to use, and dare we say pretty as possible?

More Output Types

We love our Meddev compliant templates, but not everyone feels the same way. So we set out to build as many different and flexible formats of output as possible to help people integrate their review results into their own internal documents.

We have too many to list now, but rest assured that whether you want raw data in Excel, easy copy-paste tables/summaries, or fully fledged report docs we’ll be able to generate it for you.

Trial Project Slots Available

If you're as serious about your literature workflows as we are, it's worth giving our tool a shot. There are no mind numbing training, implementation calls, and sales calls with reps that have never even performed an SLR. Just a quick call to make sure the tool would be useful, and show you the basics for your own project. After that, you're free to let it rip until the trial environment resets (usually about 30 days).

Sound fair enough? Drop me a line on Linkedin or here to grab one of our trial slots and get reviewing.