Beyond the library: IAIMS at Georgetown University

The strategic planning process and the pilot phase projects undertaken by Georgetown University for an Integrated Academic Information Management System (IAIMS) are described. Emphasis is placed on core services such as a local area network, an academic information management center in the library, and expansion of health sciences databases for improved access to biomedical information. Special applications in education and clinical care are highlighted. The library, a key to IAIMS activities, has emerged in a leadership role at Georgetown.     

Integrating knowledge resources at the point of care: opportunities for librarians.

Health sciences librarians at the University of Washington (UW) are partners in the evolution of Internet-based clinical information systems for two medical centers, University of Washington Medical Center and Harborview Medical Center, as well as the UW Primary Care Network clinics. Librarians lead information resource and systems development projects and play a variety of roles including facilitator, publisher, integrator, and educator. These efforts have been coordinated with parallel development efforts by the Integrated Advanced Information Management Systems (IAIMS) clinical informatics group in developing electronic medical record systems and clinical decision support tools. The outcome is MINDscape, a very heavily used Web view of the patient medical record with tightly integrated knowledge resources as well as numerous Web-accessible information resources and tools. The goal of this article is to provide a case study of librarian involvement in institutional information systems development at UW and to illustrate the variety of roles that librarians can assume in hospital settings.     

Indianapolis I3: the third generation Integrated Advanced Information Management Systems.

In 2001, the Regenstrief Institute for Health Care and the Indiana University School of Medicine (IUSM) began an IAIMS planning effort to create a vision and a tactical plan for the first Integrated Advanced Information Management Systems (IAIMS) implementation to cross a large area and include unaffiliated institutions. A number of elements made this planning effort unique. Among these elements were the existence of a network infrastructure that supported the Indianapolis Network for Patient Care, the existence of a mature medical informatics program at the Regenstrief Institute, and the existence of a wide-area knowledge network fostered by the IUSM libraries. However, the leadership for a strong information technology role in the IUSM that could promote collaboration in support of education and research across the diverse Indianapolis hospital systems had been lacking. By bringing together various groups, each with a commitment to improve health care quality and public health across the Indianapolis metropolitan area, regardless of individual institutional affiliation, the strategic directions for I3-Indianapolis IAIMS Initiative have been defined and the foundations for a third generation IAIMS construct have been laid in Indianapolis, Indiana.     

The knowledge workstation: an electronic environment for knowledge management

This paper focuses on the creation of the IAIMS workstation in the context of the outcomes of a year-long IAIMS strategic planning process at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions (JHMI). These outcomes include a long-term institutional vision for a functional knowledge management environment, a JHMI IAIMS model, a strategic plan, and two model prototypes. The functional requirements and specific implementation strategies for the IAIMS workstation, the prototype for managing the knowledge base of the published biomedical literature, are discussed in detail.     

IAIMS and the library at the University of Utah

The formal creation of an Integrated Academic Information Management System (IAIMS) at the University of Utah began in the fall of 1983. The keystone of the IAIMS effort is the HELP hospital information system. IAIMS at the University of Utah is a broad-based program extending across the Health Sciences Center and beyond to health professionals throughout the inter-mountain area. This paper describes the background that led to IAIMS, the IAIMS planning process, and the library's participation in this effort.     

IAIMS development at Harvard Medical School

The long-range goal of this IAIMS development project is to achieve an Integrated Academic Information Management System for the Harvard Medical School, the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, and Harvard's affiliated institutions and their respective libraries. An "opportunistic, incremental" approach to planning has been devised. The projects selected for the initial phase are to implement an increasingly powerful electronic communications network, to encourage the use of a variety of bibliographic and information access techniques, and to begin an ambitious program of faculty and student education in computer science and its applications to medical education, medical care, and research. In addition, we will explore means to promote better collaboration among the separate computer science units in the various schools and hospitals. We believe that our planning approach will have relevance to other educational institutions where lack of strong central organizational control prevents a "top-down" approach to planning.     

Integrated Advanced Information Management Systems: a twenty-year history at the University of Cincinnati

The University of Cincinnati (UC) has been active in the National Library of Medicine''s Integrated Advanced Information Management Systems (IAIMS) program since IAIMS'' inception in 1984. UC received IAIMS planning and modeling grants in the 1980s, spent the 1990s practicing its own form of “iaims” and refining its vision, and, in May 2003, received an IAIMS operations grant in the first round of awards under “the next generation” program. This paper discusses the history of IAIMS at UC and describes the goals, methods, and strategies of the current IAIMS program. The goals of UC''s IAIMS program are to: improve teaching effectiveness by improving the assessment of health professional students and residents in laboratory and clinical teaching and learning environments; improve the ability of researchers, educators, and students to acquire and apply the knowledge required to be more productive in genomic research and education; and increase the productivity of researchers and administrators in the pre-award, post-award, and compliance phases of the research lifecycle.     

Addressing the health information needs of rural Missouri health care providers: an IAIMS assistant experience

A one-year internship at the University of Missouri-Columbia offered an opportunity for a health sciences librarian to contribute to Integrated Advanced Information Management Systems (IAIMS) activities and take information management ideas back home. The IAIMS Assistant addressed information access issues. The Assistant helped to develop and administer a "Rural Provider Questionnaire" to assess the information needs of rural Missouri health care providers. The Health Sciences Library developed a Web page to bring together services and information resources in response to the perceived needs of health care providers associated with the Health Sciences Center. The article discusses the librarians' role in IAIMS initiatives.     

A Virtual Notebook for biomedical work groups

During the past several years, Baylor College of Medicine has made a substantial commitment to the use of information technology in support of its corporate and academic programs. The concept of an Integrated Academic Information Management System (IAIMS) has proved central in our planning, and the IAIMS activities that we have undertaken with funding from the National Library of Medicine have proved to be important extensions of our technology development. Here we describe our Virtual Notebook system, a conceptual and technologic framework for task coordination and information management in biomedical work groups. When fully developed and deployed, the Virtual Notebook will improve the functioning of basic and clinical research groups in the college, and it currently serves as a model for the longer-term development of our entire information management environment.     

Challenges of Interviewers' Institutional Positionings: Taking Account of Interview Content and the Interaction

Interviewing is a much used methodological tool in communication and other social sciences. For discourse analysts, interviewing is often judged to be both overused and poorly used; to understand communicative life, researchers should be observing interaction rather than asking people to report their stories, experiences, or beliefs. As discourse scholars we agree with many of the criticisms fellow discourse scholars have made, but we disagree that interviewing should be avoided. Our paper has two purposes. The first is to describe an interview design and interpretation issue that needs attention. The issue is the effect of an interviewer's institutional positioning on interview answers, a concern that only becomes visible when we look at actual interview interaction. The second purpose is to sketch out an approach that takes interview interaction and the troubles that arise in it seriously while also addressing the substantive topics/issues that motivated interviewing in the first place. After reviewing the major challenges of research interviewing, we analyze interview excerpts in two different research projects. We show how interviewers' institutional positionings caused misalignment and interactional trouble. In the conclusion we consider how to understand and use these kinds of unavoidable interactional troubles to arrive at interesting and persuasive interpretations of the topical foci of interviews.     

Information management through integration of distributed resources

Duke University Medical Center conducted a strategic planning process focused on information management needs beginning in 1983 and ending in 1985. That effort concluded that the institution was ready to establish an Integrated Academic Information Management System (IAIMS). A model was proposed in which information management was to be achieved through integrated distributed resources. The elements of the IAIMS model are ongoing policy development and planning; communications; an electronic library or resource inventory; coordination of the development or selection of the end-user function; user support; and ongoing evaluation. This model is being tested to determine its effectiveness in meeting the administrative, patient care, research, and educational needs of a basic science department and a clinical science department at Duke University.     

Linking the physical past to the program future: new library addition at the Medical College of Georgia

Planning the addition to an existing health sciences library building involved problems not normally encountered in planning a totally new structure. Some of the problems in combining the old and new buildings of the Medical College of Georgia Library and their resolution are discussed in this paper. Emphasized in particular is the relationship between institutional goals, library goals, and the library building.     

The IAIMS initiative at the University of Maryland at Baltimore

With support from the National Library of Medicine, the University of Maryland at Baltimore is creating an Integrated Academic Information Management System (IAIMS) that will serve as a prototype for academic health centers. A campus-wide undertaking, the IAIMS initiative at Maryland is characterized by its functional comprehensiveness and its planning model. The resulting strategic plan is serving as a guide in the ongoing model development within an interdisciplinary Hypertension Center.     

1991 survey of recent health sciences library building projects.

Twenty health sciences libraries reported building planning, expansion, or construction of new facilities in the association's second annual survey of recent building projects. Six projects are new, freestanding structures in which the library occupies all or a major portion of the space. Six other projects are part of new construction for separately administered units in which the library is a major tenant. The final eight projects involve additions to or renovations of existing space. Seven of these twenty libraries were still in projected, predesign, or design stages of awaiting funding approval; of those seven, five were not prepared to release the requested information. Six projects are reported here as illustrative of current building projects.     

IAIMS development at Baylor College of Medicine.

At Baylor College of Medicine, we are developing the technical and intellectual resources needed to realize the Integrated Academic Information Management System (IAIMS) concept fully. The substantial technical, organizational, and financial commitments involved demand that we align our efforts with the strategic purposes of the college. The support of science, therefore, has become the principal, but not exclusive, focus of Baylor's IAIMS effort. Even so, the information technology architecture we have created for biomedical research is proving valuable in other settings as well. And the infrastructure we are creating--the communications architecture and the linkages to information resources--serves many purposes in addition to those of research. The architecture accommodates a diversity of workstations, networks, and informational and computational servers. This will be the greatest possible chance of transferring the fruits of our Phase III development to other academic medical centers.     

Factors influencing research productivity among health sciences librarians.

Secondary analysis was performed of data collected in 1989 from a random sample of members of the Medical Library Association. Results show that about half the sample had at least one publication; academic health sciences librarians were much more likely than hospital librarians to have published. Almost half the sample had taken formal courses in research, but only a small percentage had taken continuing education (CE) courses in research. Institutional support services for research were most available in academic settings. The combination of institutional support, CE training, and research courses explained 31.1% of the variation in research productivity among academic librarians; these factors were less important in hospitals and other institutional settings. The authors suggest that health sciences librarians working outside academia should seek support for research from sources outside the employing institution.     

Designing a library: everyone on the same page?

Excerpts are presented from an interview by the Bulletin of the Medical Library Association buildings projects editor with four academic health sciences library directors: one who had recently completed a major library building project and three who were involved in various stages of new building projects. They share their experiences planning for and implementing library-building programs. The interview explores driving forces leading to new library buildings, identifies who should be involved, recalls the most difficult and exciting moments of the building projects, relates what they wished they had known before starting the project, assesses the impact of new library facilities on clients and services, reviews what they would change, and describes forces impacting libraries today and attributes of the twenty-first century library.     

Building bridges: LIS-IAIMS-BioSYNTHESIS.

Recent progress in library automation and networking is redefining the library's traditional role. The Georgetown University Medical Center Library, developer of the Library Information System (LIS), has been involved in automation for nearly a decade, and was one of the first institutions to receive an NLMIAMS grant. The two projects have evolved together. New LIS modules, such as Document Delivery and the ALERTS/CURRENT CONTENTS Search System, have been designed in a reciprocal LIS/IAIMS environment. BioSYNTHESIS, a current IAIMS research project, is a prototype information tool for tomorrow.     

An Investigation of the Educational Needs of Health Sciences Library Manpower: Part VII: Summary and Conclusions

The major findings and conclusions of a survey of manpower in health sciences libraries of the United States in 1969 are summarized. Although there does not appear to be a serious manpower shortage in terms of budgeted positions which are unfilled (demand), the manpower situation can still be considered serious when we introduce into our evaluation of the situation the question of existing levels of training and the urgent requirement (need) to bring manpower levels to a point at which adequate information services can be provided to the whole health sciences community. This is the final paper in a series of papers on a manpower study which also summarizes and analyzes the manpower data obtained by the American Hospital Association survey of 1968 and presents a number of general conclusions and recommendations for manpower planning for health sciences libraries.     

LibQUAL+(™) Meets Strategic Planning at the University of Florida

Abstract

Effective strategic planning can help a library focus on a common sense of purpose and can steer the library in directions that respond to a changing environment. The University of Florida Libraries embarked on a series of strategic planning activities in June of 2001. The process of thinking strategically has produced a renewed interest in dependable information about users' perceptions of our service quality, and LibQUAL+(?) emerged as one of the key contributors to this process. Our experience with LibQUAL+(?) and with strategic planning has been gained simultaneously. We have found that it provides a structure to support further communication with our users. LibQUAL+(?) will continue to shape our thinking as we move toward more strategic management methods that enable us to make informed decisions regarding our allocation of resources.