Recently, someone posted on Reddit (r/medicine) a query about what systems other physicians use for knowledge management.
The statement "Or, like me, do you feel like your knowledge peaked the day you left residency?" is scary. Do we really want physicians to feel this way? What about continuous medical education? How do we improve? I think the author was looking for more than just an online textbook, since it's a given that resources like that will be used. But how to really curate your knowledge bases, and store the documents you read for easy retrieval.
The respondents' replies were all over the place. The first response was "pure chaos" - just using txt files. Several used Obsidian. I tried using this for a while, but the interface is not immediately intuitive, and even though I began to get more familiar with it, I found that I was still having to hunt for basic functionality. Since I didn't use it that often, it was easy to forget which icon provided access to functionality I needed. It has a markdown editor, but as a place to store PDFs, it didn't have the folder structure I was looking for.
Several commented on storage locales where could just dump files, like Dropbox, OneNote or Google Drive.
Some suggested note-taking apps, like Joplin or Notion.
I use Zotero a lot, and highly recommend it. It's like an electronic file cabinet. The best feature is that when you are browsing on the web, and come across something worth saving, you can click on a button, and the document is saved in Zotero. That's convenient!
I just wish that there were more formatting options in the folder structure, so I could highlight a particularly important reference.
But it's clear that most doctors don't have a great way to store their new pieces of knowledge, all in one place. Things from journals, books, meeting, notes, etc.
And then, once you store it in Zotero, how do you locate what you want? You have to take pains to layout your folder structure meaningfully so that you don't have to spend a lot of time searching for a particular article.
However, once there is an LLM system, where you can load external material (e.g. PDFs) and query the database with a chat interface, I will probably stop using Zotero. There are many RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) utilities but they are still very clumsy to use. It needs to be private and not-online, because there could be private notes. But as of today, you still need to open Terminal and load the LLM, and load the RAG. You need an API key from OpenAI. The RAG model must have access to the vector database which you need to set up separately, and doctors need to know how they want to chunk the material that they input into the model. The vast majority of doctors can't be bothered with setting all this up. How many doctors are familiar with Pinecone, Weaviate, prompt engineering, Python and Jupyter notebooks?
There's still a lot of work to be done to make this user-friendly for a segment of people who need this very badly.