“Wing of Zock was created to be the online community of choice for faculty, residents, students, and executives at medical schools and teaching hospitals. Through a blog format, we hope to provide a venue for practitioners of academic medicine to share success stories; and to help academic medical centers (AMCs) prepare for health care transformation by sharing best practices. We will highlight innovations in clinical care, community engagement, medical information, technology and more. It is our goal to create an open community of learning that features idea sharing, communication, and robust discussion.”

Why is this of interest and helpful to PubMed users?
The entry for Wednesday, March 28, 2012 is titled Utility, Development, and Practice: The Learning Curve of Clinical Practice Guidelines

In the MeSH Database we are offered information about a PubMed publication type:

Practice Guideline [Publication Type]
Work consisting of a set of directions or principles to assist the health care practitioner with patient care decisions about appropriate diagnostic, therapeutic, or other clinical procedures for specific clinical circumstances. Practice guidelines may be developed by government agencies at any level, institutions, organizations such as professional societies or governing boards, or by the convening of expert panels. They can provide a foundation for assessing and evaluating the quality and effectiveness of health care in terms of measuring improved health, reduction of variation in services or procedures performed, and reduction of variation in outcomes of health care delivered.
Year introduced: 2008(1992)

As librarians OR information gathers OR information disseminators OR information guiders OR data curators who use PubMed to search for published biomedical literature. We take advantage of a controlled vocabulary but are not involved in the delivery of medicine. Therefore it is of great interest to read about the creation and implementation of Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPGs).

This is not the only Zock blog entry I have found of interest. I recommend their postings as a source of enrichment for understanding not just the vocabulary but also the thinking of health care practitioners. For enlightenment on health care issues I would think the audience for these blog postings would be universal.

In case you are curious about their name, please read “our name” on their link http://wingofzock.org/about/

Follow this link to read the entire Technical Bulletin announcement: >http://goo.gl/JSU3e

More information about the 2012 changes to MeSH are available in a new Technical Bulletin article, which compiles all of the notable MEDLINE data changes in one place. The article includes details about updates to the MeSH vocabulary including changes to the MeSH headings, updated MeSH in MEDLINE citations, a list of new MeSH headings of special interest to searchers, and the impact of notable MeSH changes on searching.

NLM’s Extramural Programs (EP) hosted a lecture by one of their Biomedical Library and Informatics Review Committee  (BLIRC) member, Dr. Eneida Mendonca on Wednesday, June 8, 2011.  The lecture was entitled, “Bringing scientific evidence into clinical practice: challenges, successes and failures.”  It is available from    http://videocast.nih.gov/summary.asp?Live=10259.

According to the University of Wisconsin Madison Biostatistics and Medical Informatics website Dr. Mendonca focuses on the “investigation of the use of natural language processing in both biomedical literature and in electronic medical record narratives in order to identify knowledge relevant to medical decision making in the context of patient care.”

This presentation addresses Dr. Mendonca’s study of the use of speech recognition software at the point of care to avoid disruption of patient care but to allow for the communication of clinical questions to promote treatment based on informed decisions.

The goal of the study is analyze the efforts to translate high-level information needs into an effective search strategy using the most appropriate biomedical electronic resources.

What makes it particularly pertinent to medical librarians is the conversation about the cognitive study of librarians as they formulate queries.  The study analyzes and evaluates the search results found using PubMed and other electronic resources such as UptoDate, STAT!Ref, etc.

As in most initial studies there are more questions posed than answers given.

Registration is open for the PubMed for Trainers class from October 5 – 26, 2011; the in-person session will be taught at NLM in Bethesda, MD. Watch this space for announcements of future PubMed for Trainers classes to be taught around the country in 2012!

For more details about the new class, as well as other NTC happenings, see the NLM Technical Bulletin article published on September 13, 2011.