Content area
Full Text
Patient Education Institute/US National Library of
Medicine
Iowa City, IA and Bethesda, MD
1995-2001
gratis
<http:l/www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/tutorial.html>
Offered on the National Library of Medicine's (NLM) MEDLINEplus Web site, these tutorials are a very affordable commercial product known as X-Plain, designed and developed by the Patient Education Institute, a privately-held company founded in 1995.
At the time of this review there are 88 tutorials organised into four major groups: Diseases and Conditions, Tests and Diagnostic Procedures, Surgery and Treatment Procedures, and Prevention and Wellness, along with four additional tutorials in Spanish. Users can also access the tutorials by going through NLM's Health Topics page <http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ healthtopics.html>, where an extensive alphabetical list (which includes useful see references) leads to simple text information pages with resource links.
Activating a tutorial opens a second browser window used to run each tutorial chosen. The opening screen offers two choices: Go to Module or Print Module (a printed reference summary, which opens an additional browser window). The Flash plug-in (Version 4.0 or higher) is required for the interactive portion, and Adobe Acrobat Reader is...