Syed Mahmood Ali Shah  ( The Aga Khan University, Karachi. )

Do not get deceived by the name - it has nothing to do with the movie Matrix - but it is definitely a “one of it’s kind” dimension, full of medical information. Ranked, Peer-Reviewed, Annotated, Updated Clinical Medicine Resources - being part of their collage, rightly describes the site. When you type in http://www.medmatrix.org, you will be asked to login if you are already a member, otherwise you can get the free membership by following a few very easy steps.
It is one of the best medical resource site you will find on the net, with a full complement of editors who continuously review and update the site adding more and more resources. Medical Matrix assigns ranks to internet resources based on their utility for point-of-care clinical application, quality, peer review, full content, multimedia features and unrestricted access. To ensure that the ranks are applied systematically and as objectively as possible, they are reviewed using standardized review parameters by the editorial board and assigned 1-5 stars. Their Editorial Board is drawn from the American Medical Informatics Association’s Internet Working Group.
Basically Medical Matrix is a collection of different dimensions, containing information resources on the web. Most of the time we have difficulty locating a topic of our interest through web portals like Yahoo and Webcrawler. But Med Matrix has collected very focussed information and classified it by Specialty, Diseases, Clinical Practice, Literature, Education, Healthcare and Professionals, Medical computing, Internet and Technology and Market place containing advertisements and employment opportunities. For instance, the specialty category ranges from Addiction and Substance abuse to Urology with 2699 Do not get deceived by the name - it has nothing to do with the movie Matrix - but it is definitely a “one of it’s kind” dimension, full of medical information. Ranked, Peer-Reviewed, Annotated, Updated Clinical Medicine Resources - being part of their collage, rightly describes the site. When you type in http://www.medmatrix.org, you will be asked to login if you are already a member, otherwise you can get the free membership by following a few very easy steps.
It is one of the best medical resource site you will find on the net, with a full complement of editors who continuously review and update the site adding more and more resources. Medical Matrix assigns ranks to internet resources based on their utility for point-of-care clinical application, quality, peer review, full content, multimedia features and unrestricted access. To ensure that the ranks are applied systematically and as objectively as possible, they are reviewed using standardized review parameters by the editorial board and assigned 1-5 stars. Their Editorial Board is drawn from the American Medical Informatics Association’s Internet Working Group.
Basically Medical Matrix is a collection of different dimensions, containing information resources on the web. Most of the time we have difficulty locating a topic of our interest through web portals like Yahoo and Webcrawler. But Med Matrix has collected very focussed information and classified it by Specialty, Diseases, Clinical Practice, Literature, Education, Healthcare and Professionals, Medical computing, Internet and Technology and Market place containing advertisements and employment opportunities. For instance, the specialty category ranges from Addiction and Substance abuse to Urology with 2699 entries, each further classified Text/MultiMedia, Abstracts, Major Cases, Images, Path./Clinical, CME, Educational Materials, Classifieds, etc.
The main link table appears on every page on the top. From there you can directly jump to Medline search, Stat search (contains different ways to search) Textbooks (are reviewed and can be bought online), Continuing Medical Education, Clinical searches, Research assistant, Symposia on the web, News, Journals, Patient education and Classifieds. Whether you need specific information to purpose can specific you hyperlinked categories.
The best part of the site is the Web symposia. You can attend selected symposia on the web without ever leaving your desk They are the Internet version of the real symposia at different parts of the world. When you click on the “Med Matrix Symposia”, you will experience distinguished faculty symposia from selected medical specialties, all synchronized with full audio arid slides from each presentation and you can also earn continuing medical education credits after virtually attending them. Current titles include: Utility of functional stress testing to manage cardiac patients, risk stratification strategies using myocardial perfusion SPECT, recent novel therapies in the treatment of acute coronary syndromes, prevention, remission and regression of chronic renal failure. More titles are added regularly. The Continuing Medical Education of Med matrix offers other online CME credit courses as well for practicing physicians.
Medical Matrix is an interface that provides access to digital clinical medicine documents that can be utilized during the time span of a patient visit. It is an academic informatics effort that is contributing to a global initiative to create a “Multimedia Clinical Medicine Database for the 21st Century.”
I would highly recommend this site for people who want to regularly update their skills and knowledge.