What does serving practitioner communities look like in practice? ClinMicroNow, recently developed and launched in partnership by the American Society for Microbiology Press (ASM) and Wiley, is one example. Rather than keep book content siloed, these two organizations decided to create one tool that invites practitioners and researchers to search and access all the content from two voluminous, authoritative clinical microbiology sources, the Manual of Clinical Microbiology (MCM) and Clinical Microbiology Procedures Handbook (CMPH), via one streamlined, modern interface.

Perhaps most novel and useful, this content is updated by peer-selected authors and editors as science advances and clinical practice changes.  Once static volumes, the tool transforms the books into actionable and timely clinical microbiology content.

Highly granular search returns relevant results from across tables, figures, and cases, in addition to text. The tool is optimized for quick and deep searches to surface the complete range of pathogenic microbial organisms and related laboratory procedures. 

Along with MCM and CMPH, ASM’s textbook Cases in Medical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases, 4th edition, is included in ClinMicroNow. Searches reveal interesting and valuable clinical cases, which expands the educational uses of this tool.

“Our work toward creating a tool that would provide the very latest vetted content for the clinical community, by necessity, broke new ground,” said Christine Charlip, Director of ASM Press. “We asked Atypon to stretch what’s possible technologically so we could deliver curated content as often as needed, and we are still working with them on new features. One is the Clinical Microbiology and Pathology Question of the Day, which is a professional development resource, and another way for ASM and Wiley to serve the community.” 

“In today’s world, being able to adapt to rapidly changing forces and scientific advances is critical,” said Jennifer Robinson, Wiley’s Director of Digital Product Management. “Using Atypon’s Literatum platform, we were not only able to build, deploy and launch ClinMicroNow during a pandemic, but we’ve been able to respond to scientific advances very quickly, most notably developments in our understanding of COVID-19. We’ve been able to update content and taxonomy in real-time.”