Reprinted from “Government Health IT“
BY Ben Bain
Published on Aug. 10, 2007

A virtual world where millions of beautiful, eternally young people with designer bodies fly from island to island seems more like a setting for a beer commercial than a place where the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would put its money.

But CDC’s decision to purchase its own island in the virtual world of Second Life makes real-world sense, said John Anderton, an associate director of communications science at CDC. His Second Life avatar, Hygeia Philo, is an attractive woman inspired by Hygeia, the ancient Greek goddess of health.

“Avatars have the good fortune of being sort of eternally youthful and healthy, but each of those avatars is connected to a person and those people do have real health needs,” he said. “It’s people’s health CDC is interested in, and people are using different tools to access [health] information.” (more…)

NLM has joined the Digital Library Federation http://diglib.org (DLF), as its thirty-sixth Strategic Member. DLF members include the Library of Congress, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the British Library, Oxford University, and major U. S. research libraries.

The membership is engaged in collaborative initiatives to identify strategies for building sustainable digital collections and services for cultural, scholarly and educational resources through work on policies, standards, best practices, prototypes and technology. NLM’s membership in the DLF complements and supports the Library’s digital collection and preservation efforts in its ongoing mission to collect, preserve and make accessible the biomedical information.

From 5/11/07 Library Journal Academic Newswire:

A coalition of scholarly publishing groups this week released a “position paper” on balancing author and publisher rights in scholarly journals. The paper Author and Publisher Rights for Academic Use: An Appropriate Balance, was assembled by the International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers (STM), along with the Association of American Publishers Professional and Scholarly Publishing division (AAP PSP), and the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP). The paper suggests that the needs of scholarly authors and the need for publishers to obtain copyright transfers or exclusive licenses can be balanced, and need not conflict. (more…)

The release of DOCLINE 3.1 on April 26 brings a change to Delivery Methods: “Mail” will no longer be a default. This means that libraries can now indicate that they will not provide or accept delivery by mail. See the images below for the “before” and “after” views of DOCLINE Delivery Methods and instructions on how to check the Delivery Methods in your DOCLINE account. (more…)

Request for Quotations:
AIDS Community Information Outreach Projects 2007

The National Library of Medicine is pleased to announce the solicitation of quotations from community-based organizations and libraries to design and conduct projects that will improve access to HIV/AIDS related health information for patients, the affected community, and their caregivers. (more…)

Far too often, ordinary citizens are placed at risk for unsafe care because important health care information is communicated using medical jargon and unclear language that exceed their literacy skills, according to a call to action released in February 2007 by The Joint Commission in its newest public policy white paper, “What Did the Doctor Say? Improving Health Literacy to Protect Patient Safety.” The paper frames the existing communications gap between patients and caregivers as a series of challenges involving literacy, language, and culture, and suggests multiple steps that need to be taken to narrow or even close this gap.

“Effective communication is a cornerstone of patient safety,” says Dennis S. O’Leary, M.D., president, The Joint Commission. “If patients lack basic understanding of their conditions and the whats and whys of the treatments prescribed, therapeutic goals can never be realized, and patients may instead be placed in harm’s way.”

The Joint Commission already promotes the involvement of patients in their care through its ongoing Speak Up™ educational campaigns. In addition, expectations regarding patient engagement and involvement in care decisions are stipulated in Joint Commission accreditation standards and its National Patient Safety Goals. But health literacy problems, which often go unrecognized and unaddressed by health care practitioners, undermine the ability of health care organizations to comply with the intents of the accreditation standards and safety goals that seek to protect the safety of patients. (more…)