University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center

From the Desk of the Director

The Domenici Center for Health Sciences Education was named in recognition of Senator Pete Domenici’s extraordinary contribution towards quality education and health care in New Mexico. Through his efforts in the US Senate, Senator Domenici made Phase I of this building possible.

Three more classrooms will be created in the lower plaza level in 2007. Phase II construction, the Clinical Performance Center (for learning clinical skills) and a new Human Anatomy Lab, will start late 2007. Phase III will include a full range of classrooms, and student support spaces including spaces for student organizations, student gathering and group study or meeting rooms.

Holly Shipp Buchanan, EdD
Associate Vice President for Knowledge Management & IT
hbuchanan@salud.unm.edu

Albuquerque to Host Library Conference

Library staff and faculty, in collaboration with other local health sciences librarians, are busy planning the logistics of the annual meeting of the five-state South Central Chapter of the Medical Library Association, to be held at the Hotel Albuquerque at Old Town on October 20-24. Approximately 200 attendees are expected. Emeritus Executive Vice President of Health Sciences Philip Eaton, MD will be one of the featured speakers. More details will follow in future issues of adobe medicus as additional speakers are identified, and the program is set.

An early and key undertaking was to create our official invitation to the meeting. See the Movie Makers article for details.

Dick Carr, MLS
Coordinator, Reference & User Support Services

SCC/MLA Planning Group - left to right: Holly Buchanan, Pat Bradley, Erinn Aspinall, Christee King, Brian Bunnett, Dick Carr.  Front: Holly Phillips, Sarah Morley.

Incoming South Central Chapter President Visits HSLIC

Brian Bunnett, MLS, MA, Deputy Director of Libraries at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas and incoming President of the South Central Chapter of the Medical Library Association (SCC/MLA), visited HSLIC February 8-9. Bunnett toured the Hotel Albuquerque at Old Town, site of the 2007 SCC/MLA conference. He also visited the Albuquerque Museum, location of the meeting’s welcoming gathering.

During his visit, Bunnett toured UNM’s University Libraries to learn how libraries at UNM are structured and meeting the changing needs in library services with respect to electronic resources. He also gave a presentation to HSLIC faculty and staff on the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center’s library and their recent reorganization to meet the changing needs of their patrons.

Sally Bowler-Hill, Information Systems Planner
Dick Carr, MLS, Coordinator, Reference &User Support Services

HSLIC Faculty and Staff Support RIOS Net Activities

Since Fall of 2004, HSLIC faculty and staff have been participating in a unique collaboration with RIOS Net (Research in the Outpatient Setting Network). RIOS Net is an organization of volunteer health care providers in New Mexico who have an interest in participating in practice-based, clinical research. The group’s co-director, Robert Williams, MD, a professor in the Department of Family and Community Medicine, was the principal investigator awarded a 3-year, $3.3 million dollar contract for RIOS Net in September 2004. This grant was the first program at the HSC funded through the National Institute of Health’s “Roadmap” initiative. The purpose of the grant was to bolster and expand RIOS Net activities as well as to build reusable and standardized information technology infrastructure in support of RIOS Net communication and research activities.

The collaboration involved hiring three information technology (IT) professionals for HSLIC’s TECHS unit. These employees are funded through the grant, and are 100% dedicated to RIOS Net IT support activities. Laurie McPherson is the IT group’s team leader and supervises Anthony Adams who works on scanable documents, palm top applications, and servers. Garth Colasurdo, in theWeb Team, is in charge of RIOS Net’s website development. Having the IT team reside in TECHS allows RIOS Net to benefit from the expertise by close association with other TECHS personnel. The group can grow in-house expertise while bridging IT development and research cultures in a very unique and efficient way. Philip Kroth, MD, MS is a funded investigator on the NIH grant and acts as the group’s biomedical informatics advisor.

Since the group began work, they have completely transformed the RIOS Net website, adding many new features, including members only pages that allow RIOS Net members to review research results restricted to their own practice. RIOS Net members also have the capability to update their contact and demographic information on the website. In addition, the group has developed processes and configured tools that have dramatically reduced the development time for conducting survey research. As an example, the group can deploy the same survey electronically on the web and through traditional paper mail with scanable documents. They have operationalized surveys involving two other research networks in addition to RIOS Net including the process for offering Continuing Medical Education (CME) credits online.

Funding for this collaborative continues to August of 2007. The group would like that the work they have done developing standardized and reusable IT tools for clinical and community-based research to be used by the new HSC Clinical and Translational Sciences Center.

Phil Kroth, MD
Distance Services Coordinator
Assistant Director
Health Sciences Informatics Program Development

DynaMed

DynaMed is the newest HSLIC library resource - an evidence-based database providing point-of-care health information. Peer-reviewed disease summaries are available for over 2,000 topics most commonly seen in primary care. Over 500 journals and evidence-based sources are monitored and topic summaries are updated daily as new evidence is identified.

A standard template for each summary includes sections for: Description (including ICD-9 codes), History, Physical, Diagnosis, Prognosis, Treatment, Prevention and Screening, References, and Patient Information. Navigation is by alphabetic listing or advanced search option with the ability to view the entire summary or link to specific sections. Within the summary, users will find hyperlinks to practice guidelines and public access electronic journal articles. In addition, DynaMed uses Level of Evidence labels to alert users to the quality of the evidence. These labels are based on the Strength of Recommendation Taxonomy (SORT). For more information about this labeling scheme see Am Fam Physician 2004 Feb 1;69(3):548-56.

DynaMed is available in a PDA application for Palm OS and Microsoft mobile devices. Users may access this resource off-campus with a NetId user name and password.

To give us feedback or ask questions about this point-of-care resource, contact the HSLIC library at 272-2311 or http://hsc.unm.edu/library/webforms/refquest.shtml.

Sara Knox-Morley, MLS
Clinical Services Librarian

Larry J. Gordon Papers Online

Now available online are the Larry J. Gordon Papers held by HSLIC’s New Mexico Health Historical Collection. This new resource features biographic notes on Mr. Gordon’s career, select digitized unpublished papers, a listing with photographs of his lifelong achievements and awards, as well as a listing of his published works.

Mr. Gordon’s career encompassed nearly every major aspect related to the organization of environmental health and protection, and public health programs and agencies in New Mexico.

Over his thirty-eight years of public service, Mr. Gordon was a sanitarian in various local, county, and state positions, he founded several offices and services in his field including the Albuquerque-Bernalillo County Environmental Health Department. Among his many noteworthy accomplishments, Mr. Gordon served as the New Mexico Cabinet Secretary for Health and Environment under Governor Garrey Carruthers.

He retired from public service in 1988, and took a position as a Visiting Professor in the School of Public Administration, University of New Mexico from 1988-97. He also was a Senior Fellow at the University of New Mexico Institute for Public Policy from 1997-99, and has been an Adjunct Professor in the Political Science Department since 1996. In 2004, Mr. Gordon officially retired from the University.

To learn more about Mr. Gordon and his career, access HSLIC’s online resource at http://hsc.unm.edu/library/spc/Gordon/biography.shtml. This new resource is made possible in part by the Larry and Nedra Gordon Endowment for Environmental Health established in 2005, to enable HSLIC to purchase library resources and promote new initiatives in the area of environmental health.

Laura Hall
Senior Program Manager, Special Collections

Opening Soon – the HSC Hall of Discovery

With the completion of the Domenici Center for Health Sciences Education this January, the HSC Hall of Discovery is planning to open its first exhibit to the public. The exhibit, entitled Making a Difference: A Photo Essay, will open in February in the third-floor meeting space of the Center.

The Hall of Discovery is a museum program administered by HSLIC. The new program will promote an understanding of the history, scientific advancements, and current issues surrounding health sciences in the state of New Mexico. The program will inspire the next generation of health care professionals, faculty, staff and partners to the unlimited possibilities in addressing the most important questions of human health.

Making a Difference: A Photo Essay consists of fifteen photographs taken over the past five years by Barry Staver, a photojournalist and shared winner of a Pulitzer Prize in Journalism. The photographs collectively tell the story of the UNM Health Sciences Center – capturing the HSC’s missions and passion of the students, faculty, and staff to learn, teach, discover, and serve the citizens of New Mexico. The exhibit is funded by the Office of the Executive Vice President for Health Sciences and is expected to run for approximately five years.

More exhibits are planned including the Hall of Discovery’s premier exhibit – Portraits of Care: Stories of Health Care in New Mexico – expected to open later this year and be on display for approximately two years in the main lobby area. This exhibit will explore the legacies of frontiersmen and women health care providers working in rural New Mexico; the mass migration of tuberculars to the state in the late 1890’s through the mid 1920’s; the co-existence of European-based and traditional forms of medicine; and the establishment of the UNM College of Nursing, UNM College of Pharmacy, and the UNM School of Medicine.

In addition to the above exhibits, the Hall of Discovery is on the schedule to host two National Library of Medicine traveling exhibits: Frankenstein: Penetrating the Secrets of Nature, which will be on display in the spring of 2008; and the Changing Faces of Medicine: Celebrating America’s Women Physicians, which will be on display in the spring of 2009.

For more information about this program, please contact Laura Hall, Special Collections, Senior Program Manager for HSLIC at (505) 272-6518 or by e-mail at ljhall@salud.unm.edu.

Laura Hall
Senior Program Manager, Special Collections