Lee Health Medical Library

Explore OVID Databases: MEDLINE, Emcare, and HealthSTAR

Article Date
May 31, 2023

When you are ready to do research, keep Ovid Medline, Ovid Emcare, and Ovid HealthSTAR in mind.

MEDLINE is the National Library of Medicine's premier database that contains bibliographic citations and author abstracts from more than 5,200 biomedical journals. The database includes sources from professionals in medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, allied health, and pre-clinical sciences. The content in MEDLINE is almost identical to the content in PubMed, although the interfaces are very different. 

Ovid Emcare is a nursing and allied health database that provides access to 3,700 international, currently indexed, peer-reviewed journals, with up to 250,000 records added each year. It covers all nursing specialties and nursing healthcare professions. Emcare also includes international coverage of allied health, education and training, development and management, midwifery, health and healthcare economics, clinical medical and healthcare social work, psychiatry and mental health, and traumatology, emergency, and critical care medicine.

Ovid HealthSTAR is comprised of data from MEDLINE. It contains citations to the published literature on health services, technology, administration, and research. It focuses on the non-clinical aspects of health care delivery, along with the clinical aspects. HealthSTAR includes these topics: evaluation of patient outcomes; effectiveness of procedures, programs, products, services, and processes; administration and planning of health facilities, services, and manpower; health insurance; health policy; health services research; health economics and financial management; laws and regulation; personnel administration; quality assurance; licensure; and accreditation.

To access these databases from on-site, click on the Databases tab at the top of our webpage, and then the tabs beneath it labeled Evidence-Based Medicine, Medical, and Nursing. From off-site, use your OpenAthens account.  Don’t have an OpenAthens account? Click on “OpenAthens Registration” on the left side of our webpage, fill out the form, and we will create one for you!