KansasHealthOnline.org is closing

One week ago, we announced that KansasHealthOnline.org is closing for good. That time has arrived. We are still committed to providing quality health care information to the community and want to do so as strategically as we can.
There is still no single service that provides everything envisioned by KHO, but if you are looking for reliable health care or insurance information then there are some sites we can recommend.

Here are some good places to start - especially if you live in Kansas or the Kansas City metro area:

• KCHealthWellness.org. The Health & Wellness Center is the newest enhancement to the recently renovated Lucile H. Bluford Branch of The Kansas City Public Library and was created in partnership with Truman Medical Centers and the Health Sciences Institute of Metropolitan Community Colleges – Penn Valley to respond more effectively to consumer needs.
• Dykes Library, KU Medical Center. A.R. Dykes Library provides access to premium information resources for visitors and patients of KU Medical Center.
• Consumer Health Complete. Premium health information database available to all Kansas citizens through the State Library of Kansas.
• KSHealthConsumer.com. The mission of the Kansas Health Consumer Coalition is to advocate for affordable, accessible, and quality health care in Kansas. 
• KSInsurance.org. The major functions of the Kansas Insurance Department are to regulate and review companies for financial solvency and regulatory compliance, educate consumers, assist consumers, and license agents selling insurance products in the state.
• KDHEKS.gov. Kansas Department of Health provides public health information and data.

You can always find archived versions of the site in Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.

A.R. Dykes Library Participates in Interprofessional Education and Practice Grant

A.R. Dykes Library is a partner in the ICAP-Peds grant, recently procured by E. LaVerne Manos, DNP, RN-BC.  Heather Collins, Biomedical Librarian for the School of Nursing, will lead knowledge management and research support services for the grant. The Dykes Library Research Team, Rachel, Gyore, Crystal Cameron-Vedros, and Jason Stirnaman, are contributing to the research support services for this innovate grant partnership. Additionally, a group has been created in Meet Our Experts for the Center for Interprofessional Educationhttp://experts.kumc.edu/groups/118-Center_for_Interprofessional_Education .

The Interprofessional Collaborative Acute Care Practice ICAP-Peds grant will help at-risk children and their families transition smoothly from hospital to home to follow-up care. We will facilitate the training and organization of high-functioning interprofessional care teams skilled at developing comprehensive transitional care plans. Several innovative training techniques will be utilized to increase interprofessional collaboration and care. There are many unique features of the ICAP Peds project, these include; the use of an Academic Electronic Health Record, In-situ simulation, Mobile technology and Health literacy training to foster patient and family participation to improve care.

The outcomes expectations for this project are;  decrease in readmission, decrease in utilization of ED for standard care services, increase in patients with a medical home, and a model for collaborative practice including the patient and family as these patients move from hospital to home to follow-up care.

Columbia Research Data Symposium 2013

A Research Data Symposium was held at Columbia University on Wednesday, February 27. Here are a couple of projects that stood out while trolling tweets and @robincamille’s notes .

Two innovate startups that especially stood out to me:

• Figshare.com
• Nanohub.org

Both are novel approaches to sharing research data and even, in Nanohub's case, analysis software. Nanohub is building a more community-focused platform for nanotechnology researchers. Figshare, backed by for-profit MacMillan publishing company, is open to all disciplines.

Both strike me as repository platforms that people might actually want to use.