For 53 years, Physicians Desk Reference« or PDR« has been the leading provider of vital information and guidance on prescription drugs. Found in just about every doctor’s office and pharmacy in the nation, PDR is considered the standard prescription drug reference.

Recently, Medical Economics, the company that publishes PDR, decided to change the platform for the CD-ROM version of PDR. In doing so, Medical Economics had to contend with several thousand documents filled with medical terms that customers had to access very quickly. PDR wanted natural language as well as "boolean" search options, like and/or/not. For example, a physician might want to do a search for depression and serotonin and inhibitors and come up with all the drugs in that category.

Further, Medical Economics needed a solution for data access that would be easy for their customers to use. Medical Economics needed a solution that was flexible enough for its programmers to have control over the user interface. And Medical Economics wanted a solution that would provide access through Visual Basic, Medical Economics’ programming language of choice for applications distributed on CD-ROM.

Medical Economics also was looking for a product that contained a programming API that was relatively quick for their programmers to implement. The API had to easily provide for such features as "hit highlighting" in retrieved documents. "dtSearch was the only solution that fit the bill," said Michael Rizzo of the Medical Economics programming staff.

"It had great features, and was very easy to use." Medical Economics used the dtSearch Text Retrieval Engine to pre-build an index containing the information in the printed PDR. Medical Economics then pre-loaded the search indexes along with the original documents onto a CD.

According to Mr. Rizzo, Medical Economics created an interface using the dtSearch Text Retrieval Engine that would allow the user to easily choose any number of options in a search, such as fuzzy, stemming, phonic and natural language. For example, stemming gave users the ability to search for inhibit and find inhibitors. Fuzzy searching worked where a physician might mistype serotonin as serotomin. Natural language searching allowed a less sophisticated user to type in a completely unstructured "plain English" search request—depression anxiety serotonin—and retrieve the most relevant documents.

With dtSearch, Medical Economics was also able to implement such features as a scrolling list of all indexed words. And dtSearch gave Medical Economics the ability to mark search "hits" in retrieved documents. "Hit highlighting was key," said Mr. Rizzo. "Technical support was excellent, and willingness to implement feature enhancements was awesome," says Dan Giachin, Director of Electronic Product Development.

Finally, said Mr. Rizzo, dtSearch gave Medical Economics the possibility of even greater feature expansion in future versions of PDR, including such features as searches limited to particular fields. For example, a user could search for all entries that contain the word SSRI in the drug document description field.