The Internet and World Wide Web are great resources for doing literature searches, accessing evidence-based guidelines and communicating with your patients. But are these tools ready for the exam room?

One site certainly is. Maintained by the National Center for Emergency Medicine Informatics, EDHome (www.ncemi.org/cgi-ncemi/edhome.pl) brings more than 50 clinical decision-support tools to your “web top” to help you, for example, compute the probability of myocardial infarction, calculate body mass, predict peak flows or predict endotracheal tube size according to age.

The site — designed and maintained by emergency physicians Craig Feied, MD, Mark Smith, MD, and Jonathan Handler, MD — is intended for use by practicing doctors who need help in real time, while they're seeing patients. Among its features are free access to the full text of Physician's Desk Reference, a searchable database of ICD-9 codes and a toxicology reference center with multiple links. And you can edit the home page to display your practice's name and several links of your own at the top. A very cool site!