Terms of Use

MEDiscuss CDSS is intended for qualified healthcare professionals: doctors, postgraduate and senior residents, and other registered practitioners who are trained to interpret clinical information and act on it.

It is not written for patients or for the general public. The tools name drugs, doses and thresholds without the explanation a patient would need, and an output read without clinical training can be misunderstood in ways that cause harm. MEDiscuss publishes material written for patients and the general public separately from this system.

By using the system you accept these terms. If you do not accept them, please do not use it.

It is a set of calculators, algorithms and clinical pathways. Each one states the sources it was built from and the date on which it was last revised, so that you can judge for yourself how current it is.

It is not a diagnosis, not a prescription, not a treatment plan and not a second opinion. It has not examined your patient, it does not know what you know about them, and it cannot see what has changed since you last looked.

An output is one input to your decision. Check it against the patient in front of you, against your institution's protocol, and against the current product label of any drug it names. Where an output and your clinical judgement disagree, your judgement governs.

The content is written for Indian practice first. Where Indian national programme guidance differs from international guidance, the national guidance is followed: NACO, NTEP, UIP, NRCP, NVBDCP, ICMR, IAP, API and others of that kind. Drug names, fixed dose combinations, strengths, units and reporting requirements are those in use in India.

The system is reachable from anywhere and anyone may open it. That is deliberate, and it carries a caution.

If you practise outside India, some of this will not apply to you. A drug named here may not be licensed where you are. It may be supplied at a different strength, under a different name, or in a combination your formulary does not stock. A threshold, a schedule or a reporting requirement may differ from the one your own national body publishes. Check each output against your own national guidance before you act on it. That check is yours to make and this system cannot make it for you.

The content is prepared with care from the sources named on each tool, and it is reviewed periodically. The revision date shown on a tool is the date that tool was last reviewed, not the date the site was last touched.

Even so: medical knowledge changes, guidance is revised, and errors are made. Internal audits of this system have found defects, and those defects have been corrected and recorded. Nothing here is represented as complete, current or free of error.

If something looks clinically wrong, a dose, a threshold or a step that does not match current guidance, please tell us through the contact form. Messages of that kind are read first. You do not need an account and you do not need to give your name.

No licence fee, no registration and no permission is needed for any of the following.

• Use the tools in your clinical work, as often as you like, free of charge.
• Share a link to a tool, or a link that carries a calculation, with a colleague.
• Print a result, or save it as a PDF, and file it in a patient's record.
• Keep the system on the home screen of your phone and use it offline.
• Quote a short extract in teaching material or a presentation, with attribution to MEDiscuss CDSS and the address of the tool.

Without written permission, please do not do any of the following.

• Copy the content in bulk, by hand or with an automated tool, scraper or crawler.
• Republish the tools or their content elsewhere, in whole or in part, as your own work or as anybody else's.
• Use the content to train, fine-tune or evaluate a machine learning model, or to build a derived dataset.
• Build the system, or any part of it, into a product, application or service, whether or not you charge for it.
• Remove or alter the attribution, the disclaimer or the revision date that a tool carries.
• Try to reach any part of the system, any account or any data that is not meant for you, or interfere with how the system runs for other people.
• Present an output as something it is not, for example as an individualised treatment plan issued by MEDiscuss for a named patient.

Written permission is asked for at admin@mediscuss.org. A request for teaching or non-commercial academic use is usually straightforward.

Never type a patient's name, hospital number, phone number, address or any other identifier into any field on this site. No tool here needs one. The tools are built to take values, not people, and asking for an identifier is a defect we would want reported.

This applies whether or not you have an account, and it applies to the contact form and the contributor form as much as to a calculator. Free text is never carried in a shared link, but the rule is about your patient's privacy rather than about how the link is built.

An account is optional and every tool works without one. It adds saved calculations, favourites, and the ability to compare the same patient's values over time. If you create one, then the following applies.

• The account is yours alone. Please do not share it or the sign-in code sent to you.
• The address you sign in with must be one you control.
• You may delete the account, and everything held with it, at any time from your account page.
• An account may be closed if these terms are broken, or if it is dormant for long enough that keeping it serves nobody.

What is stored, why it is stored and how long it is kept is set out in the privacy notice, which is a separate document.

This covers what you send through the contact form, the contributor form, or by any other route: a correction, a suggestion, a reference, a draft, a calculation, a pathway.

By sending it you confirm that it is yours to send, that sending it breaches nobody else's rights or confidence, and that it contains no patient identifiers. You give permission for it to be used in the tools and in the material around them.

Where a contribution is used, you are acknowledged by name on the tool it went into, unless you ask not to be. Nothing is paid for a contribution and nothing is implied about payment by the fact that a contribution has been used.

Tools link out to guidelines, articles and national programme documents held on other sites. Those sites are not ours, we do not control what they publish, and we cannot promise that a document will still be there or still say the same thing. A link is a pointer to a source, not an endorsement of everything at the other end of it.

The system is offered free of charge and as it is. There is no promise that it will be available at any particular time, that it will run without interruption, or that a tool you used yesterday will be there tomorrow.

Tools are added, revised and occasionally withdrawn. A tool that is found to be unsafe, or that can no longer be kept current, is withdrawn rather than left standing. Where a tool is withdrawn, its old address is redirected to whatever now answers the same clinical question, or to the catalogue where nothing does.

This section is worth reading slowly.

So far as the law allows, the system is offered without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including any implied warranty that it is accurate, complete, current, uninterrupted or fit for a particular purpose.

The treating clinician retains complete responsibility for every diagnostic, dosing and therapeutic decision. So far as the law allows, no liability is accepted for any injury, loss or damage of any kind arising from the use of this system or from reliance on anything in it, whether that loss is direct or indirect.

Where the law does not permit an exclusion of this kind, the exclusion does not apply and nothing here is intended to remove a protection you have that cannot be removed.

The reason for this section is not really a legal one. This system cannot see your patient. You can. That is why the decision has to stay with you.

The version and the date at the top of this page are the whole mechanism. When the text changes, both change, and what changed is recorded. Continuing to use the system after a change means you accept the version then in force.

A change to something you may do, or to a responsibility you carry, will be stated plainly rather than folded quietly into a revision.

What is stored, why, for how long, and how to have it deleted is set out in the privacy notice. It is a separate document with its own version and date, and it is the one to read on any question about data.

MEDiscuss CDSS is maintained by Dr Shashikiran Umakanth, MEDiscuss, Udupi, Karnataka, India.

• Something looks clinically wrong, or a correction: the contact form. Read first.
• You would like to contribute or review: join MEDiscuss CDSS.
• Permission requests, and anything else: admin@mediscuss.org.