davidrothman.net

I somehow missed this when it first appeared, and only recently caught it in one of my routine searches that generate feeds for my aggregator.

Mitch Rozonkiewiecz, our hospital’s VP of Information Services and CIO was interviewed in Healthcare Informatics about CGH’s “Digital Passport” initiatives.

It is interesting to get a good, clear look at the views and priorities of a hospital CIO- and I am hopeful we’ll find good ways to effectively integrate EBM services into our application of the EMR system.

If you’d like to see a a short demonstration of the features of CGH’s EMR, Eclipsys’ Sunrise Clinical Manager, check out this link:
http://www.cgh.org/SCM_Intro_and_overview_060609.exe

Yes, it is an executable. Yes, you SHOULD think twice about downloading an executable from an unknown source. Here’s what you need to know:

• I didn’t create it, but IT professionals at Community General Hospital of Greater Syracuse did.
• I have installed it on multiple machines to absolutely no ill effect. It’s just an install package for the Camtasia Player and the media it plays.
• It is virus-free, malware-free, harmless, and can be deleted when you’re done with it.

September 20th, 2006 | Category: EBM, EMRs/EHRs/PHRs, Technology, Video | Comments Off

I sent the following to MEDLIB-L yesterday:

From: David Rothman Mailed-By: gmail.com
To: MEDLIB-L
Date: Sep 7, 2006 10:51 AM
Subject: Teaching Evidence Based Medicine

Good morning.

My library has a physician patron who has been tasked to teach a class on Evidence Based Medicine to students studying to be Physicians Assistants.

Could you please perhaps suggest some of the most important texts or resources that this patron will want to acquire and utilize in creating her syllabus and course? The patron already has Users’ Guides to the Medical Literature .

I would be grateful to have any suggestions you might have emailed directly to me at davidDOTrothmanATgmailDOTcom, and would be pleased to summarize for the list if there is significant interest.

Thank you in advance for your kind assistance and expertise.

David Rothman

Thanks very much to all who sent suggestions. These suggestions have been passed on to our library’s grateful patron, who asked that I express her thanks along with my own to you lovely, friendly, helpful people. This is the first time I’ve asked for help on MEDLIB-L, and the response was really wonderful.

I received a great number of requests to summarize for the list. I am attaching them to this blog post because MEDLIB-L does not allow attachments. (I had planned to share this information on my blog anyway.)

Please click here for the summary: Summary_Teaching EBM.xls

Also see an annotated Bibliography that could not be taken apart and added to the summary without sacrificing full attribution against the author’s wishes: ClassAnnotatedBibliography_Pappas.doc

If the MS formats cause anyone any trouble, please let me know and I’ll be glad to convert them to something else.

If anyone particularly expert in the topic would like to critique this summary and send back to me thoughts on what is really the creme de la creme in its contents, I’d welcome that.

Thanks again for your kind assistance- it is sincerely appreciated.

September 8th, 2006 | Category: EBM, Teaching/Training | Comments (1)

Interesting article from Information World Review on the “Information Specialist in Context” in healthcare. Nothing revelatory, but good stuff on evidence based medicine (or evidence based healthcare) and changes anticipated with the adoption of EMRs (or EHRs). Good to have another reminder that the profession is changing in exciting ways- and that medical libraryfolk need to dive right in as soon and as hard as possible. (Which makes me think of Dean Giustini’s comments.)

Last paragraph:

Health librarians no longer find themselves only staffing reference desks or building collections. Emerging roles are surfacing in all arenas and within all these roles information professionals can start to develop medicine as an information profession.

The article also mentions Evidence Matters:

Proquest recently moved into the EBM arena with a distribution deal with Evidence Matters. Suzanne BeDell, vice-president of Higher Education Publishing ProQuest, says: “Evidence Matters has ambitious plans in terms of content and we plan to continue to make it more usable and provide more synthesis.”

Interesting that the same morning I find this article, I also find one on Evidence Matters, announcing that it “…is releasing specialty content in three new areas for its evidence-based search engine.”

In addition to this module release, Evidence Matters recently enhanced its user interface. Improvements included a simplified look to the Evidence Matters basic search page for IP-recognition users. As well, the advanced Question Wizard form has been reorganized to make it even easier to construct searches in a PICO search structure (PICO = “Patient/Problem,” “Intervention,” “Comparison,” “Outcome”). The PICO search structure provides for more evidence-based results. New one-click contextual help is now available throughout the product web pages. Evidence Matters can be accessed at http://www.evidencematters.com.

September 6th, 2006 | Category: EBM, EMRs/EHRs/PHRs, Interfaces, Technology | Comments Off

In this post, Bob Sutton (Professor of Management Science and Engineering in the Stanford Engineering School) talks about evidenced based medicine, evidence based management, and the need for lbrarians.

Some highlights:

…I’ve realized that the rise of the web, blogs, Wikipedia, and all that easily available information might reduce the need for trips to the library for some of us, but – although their roles are changing – it has also made the need for librarians even greater than ever. There is an ever growing pile of information out there and it keeps getting harder and harder to tell what is true and what is not…

In short, although the rise of the web has changed what librarians do, it also means that we need them more than ever because there are so many facts out there now and they are so easy to get, and it is so hard to tell which ones to believe – and they actually care about facts and evidence, and know where to get them. Indeed, as I understand it, this partly why many major universities – like The University of Michigan and University of California at Berkeley – have renamed their old library schools to “Information” schools.

Read the whole thing.

A bio of Bob Sutton

August 26th, 2006 | Category: EBM | Comments (1)