MLA Distance Education

Now's the Time: Understanding the Electronic Health Record Maze and Health Sciences Librarians' Roles

MLA's Educational Webcast
Originally held Wednesday, March 24, 2010, 1:00 p.m.–3:00 p.m., central time

Presenters

Margaret M. Bandy, AHIP

Margaret M. Bandy, AHIP is the manager of library and media services at Exempla Saint Joseph Hospital in Denver, CO. Bandy has been the head medical librarian at Exempla Saint Joseph Hospital since 1979. She served on the MLA Board of Directors from 2005–2008 and was board liaison to the Task Force on Vital Pathways for Hospital Librarians during that time and contributed to the final report of the committee. As chair of the Hospital Libraries Section Standards Committee, she led the work on the 2007 update of the Medical Library Association Standards for Hospital Libraries. Other activities include MLA liaison to the Joint Commission 2003–2005 and MLA Nominating Committee member 2000–2001. She is past chair of the Consumer and Patient Health Information Section of MLA and served on the Task Force on the Role of the Librarian in Consumer Health that developed a policy statement for MLA. Bandy has been a member of the Midcontinental Chapter of the Medical Library Association since 1979 and was chair 1987–1988. She was president of the Colorado Council of Medical Librarians (CCML) in 1983 and 2003, and created the CCML Advocacy Committee in 2003 to respond to the crisis facing hospital libraries in Colorado. The CCML Advocacy Committee developed the "Myths and Truths about Library Services" materials that are on the MLA Vital Pathways website. Recently, she worked with Melody Allison to produce a collaboration proposal from MLA to the Magnet Recognition Program. With Rosalind F. Dudden, AHIP, FMLA, she has begun work on the second edition on the Medical Library Association Guide to Managing Health Care Libraries, which is scheduled for publication in early 2011.

Bandy has been involved in integrating point of care products into the EMR (Epic). The three-hospital system recently completed a review of 5 products: DynaMed, Clin-eguide, BMJ Point of Care, UpToDate, and First Consult to select one to link from the physicians' problem list to a reference resource. Exempla librarians put together a table to help clinicians with evaluation of products, and feedback was solicited from clinicians at the three hospitals by their CMO's. She is also supporting development of order sets for the EMR by providing links to evidence-based resources and will be involved with similar work for the nursing care plans.

Janice H. Willis

Janice Willis is the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) support coordinator in the MEDLARS Management Section (MMS) at the National Library of Medicine (NLM), Bethesda, MD. The UMLS integrates and distributes key terminology, classification, and coding standards to promote the creation of more effective and interoperable biomedical information systems and services, including electronic health records. She is proud of her thirty years of service at NLM, which began in the serial records section and continued in MMS, where she helped to maintain MEDLINE and related databases. After retirement of the legacy ELHILL retrieval system, she joined the effort to transition the UMLS from research and development into production and to improve and expand UMLS quality assurance, documentation, training, and user support. She is coauthor of the MLA accredited continuing education course, "Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) Basics." Willis participates in a variety of NLM terminology efforts and currently serves as a US representative to the Member Forum of the International Health Terminology Standards Data Organization (IHTSDO). She has a master of library science degree from the University of Maryland, College of Library and Information Services, College Park, MD in 1976.

Sara Pimental, AHIP

Sara Pimental is a senior consultant for Kaiser Permanente's national clinical website for staff, Clinical Library. She is responsible for most contracts for third-party resources, training clinicians on use of the site and marketing. In addition, she works on various interoperability projects linking Kaiser's electronic heath record (EHR), HealthConnect, and content on Clinical Library. She is currently investigating the feasibility of linking third-party content to the EHR. Pimental has worked for Kaiser since 1989. She received her master in library and information science degree from the University of California–Berkeley and has completed the National Library of Medicine medical informatics fellowship program. She is a distinguished member of the Academy of Health Information Professionals.

David Sweet

David Sweet has been director of library services for the American Health Information Association (AHIMA) for the past eleven years. AHIMA is the professional community of 56,000 members that improves health care by advancing best practices and standards for health information management and is the trusted source for education, research, and professional credentialing. AHIMA has taken a leadership role in developing interoperable standards for electronic health records and personal health records. While at AHIMA, Sweet was responsible for the creation and oversight of AHIMA's online Body of Knowledge (BoK), the premier health information management knowledge management (KM) system. The BoK contains e-HIM practice guidance reports, guidelines and white papers covering a variety of health care information topics, leadership models, and toolkits. Sweet's previous experience includes resource center manager for the Chicago office of Ernst & Young, which specialized in health care research.

Video-taped Presenters

Elaine Alligood

Elaine Alligood has worked at the National Library of Medicine (NLM), Johns Hopkins, the University of Virginia, Elsevier, Harvard, and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). Currently, Alligood is an informationista at the VA Technology Assessment Program (TAP), a Boston-based national VA program reporting to the VA Patient Care Services director. TAP carries out systematic reviews and effectiveness research on current and emerging health care technologies. A past chair of the Information Resources Group, a special interest group in the Health Technology Assessment International society (HTAi), she has planned the IRG's annual meeting program and workshops for the '04 Krakow and '05 Rome meetings. Alligood delivered search engine updates at recent IRG meetings, the most recent a virtual presentation for the 2009 Singapore IRG workshop on searching soft science topics on lesser known search engines. For HTAi, she developed a Google custom search engine; the HTAi Vortal searches over 300 HTA related websites. Keenly interested in clinical applications of computer and web search technologies for decision support, Alligood is a Fellow of the Woods Hole Biomedical Informatics Workshop. While serving on a national VA workgroup for clinical decision support, she developed a VA Intranet clinical evidence portal with Google Custom Search applications; a link to this portal sits on the VA EHR tools menus. In October 2009, she presented with Lorri Zipperer, Linda Williams, and Barbara Jones at the Diagnostic Error in Medicine Conference on the role librarians play in the prevention and assessment of diagnostic errors. At the moment, she's planning the annual meeting program for the Massachusetts Health Science Libraries Network (MAHSLIN) in May: "Be the Change!"

Kelly Near

Kelly Near is the outreach librarian for the Claude Moore Health Sciences Library at the University of Virginia (UVa). She is also a certified women's health care nurse practitioner. In her current position, Near is involved in teaching students, faculty, and staff in the university as well as off-campus preceptors about evidence-based medicine, medical database searching, and information management. She holds an adjunct faculty appointment in the department of public health sciences where she teaches students in the master's of public health (MPH) program. She works closely with the UVa program manager for patient and family education at the health system and currently serves on the patient and family education subcommittee. In addition, she also is a member of the UVa Health System's Patient Safety Committee of the Quality Council. Recently, Near has been working as a member of the design and workflow validation teams for MyChart, which is the patients' portal to UVa's new electronic medical record system.

Since coming to UVa in 2001, Near has been the principal investigator for a variety of projects intended to help special populations use technology to find reliable health information. Her interests include patient education and health literacy, and her projects include work with seniors, lay migrant health workers, parish nurses, and adult education providers in the community.

Annette Williams

Annette Williams is associate director, Vanderbilt University's Knowledge Management and Eskind Biomedical Library where she works closely with assistant vice-chancellor for knowledge management and director of the Eskind Biomedical Library, Nunzia B. Giuse, AHIP, FMLA. In her role, Williams actively participates in the establishment of an informatics approach to the delivery of best evidence and currently is responsible for resource allocation for evidence requests via the Evidence Dispatcher, an online system designed to map complex clinical questions to the information specialist best suited in skills and expertise to provide the evidence. Formally trained as a cataloger, Williams adapted her expertise in metadata structuring and data organizing into helping establish knowledge management practices for a multitude of projects currently overseen by the knowledge management team. The knowledge management team is responsible for integrating librarian-filtered evidence into informatics tools such as (1) StarPanel, Vanderbilt's electronic medical record (EMR) system via provision of patient-specific synthesized evidence packets; (2) the institution's computer physician order entry (CPOE) system via provision of orderset support; and (3) MyHealthAtVanderbilt, the institution's patient portal via provision of patient-specific consumer-level information.

Watch MLANET for more information! Or contact Debra Cavanaugh, mlapd3@mlahq.org, 312.419.9094 x32.