St. Louis based MD Consult, a source of clinical information within the medical community, now has a mobile computing option, MDC Mobile.

MDC Mobile is included at no charge as part of the MD Consult service, which works with 285,000 paid users at more than 1,700 health care institutions around the world. According to the company, it provides medical professionals with

--the ability to record, store and initiate searches on MD Consult, right from a Palm OS or Pocket PC handheld device
--daily feeds of medical news --weekly drug updates
-- and access to the latest abstracts from hundreds of medical journals via the "Mobile Library" function, the ability to access and use other separately purchased handheld/PDA clinical reference products from the Elsevier family, including the Harriet Lane Handbook and the new Osler Medical Handbook.

According to Elsevier, the medical information provider behind MD Consult, it built MDC Mobile as a flexible mobile clinical information platform for physicians "With MDC Mobile, Elsevier is closer to realizing its vision of an integrated electronic information service offering a full range of clinical information products designed to meet the needs of physicians," said Mitchell Lapides, an executive vice president at Elsevier's Health Science Division. "It is our intent to provide a definitive 'handheld home' for physicians, giving them not only with the features and information they require today, but also building with them over time as those requirements evolve."