NHS Evidence is here

What do people think of the new look? It combines a Google-esque search with a cleaner display of the content. NICE also has a new website… 

Meanwhile I’ve been catching up on the twitter collective of what happened at CILIP last night. The elephant in the room being if branches and groups are delivering what people want from CILIP and CILIP aren’t interested in new technologies (or even simple things like email provision to said groups and electronic payment systems) then why shouldn’t branches and groups become independent? Funding of course is an issue but there is this thing called sponsorship and much of the running ‘costs’ are already being carried by individuals on committees setting up blogs and websites as well as events that feed into the needs of members (and naughty non-members or subscribers such as I).

“Searching for information on the inter …

“Searching for information on the internet costs the UK economy the equivalent of about £6.2bn in time, according to a study by enterprise search specialist Simplexo.” This from a recent article in the Information World Review. The study blamed complex information and ineffective search functionality for the massive time costs.

They suggest that we are all searchers, and each individual cannot avoid searching for things. So instead of shouldering that burden, we need to influence information storage and search engine design.

Cilip 2.0 Open session

Just to reiterate, if you are on Twitter, you can follow this afternoon’s discussion about the value of Twitter and other web 2.0 technology to CILIP (from 2.30 to 4.30pm GMT). Using a search engine such as Monitter or Twitterfall, plug in the search term #cilip2 to view the discussion thread, more or less as it happens.

Phil Bradley has been thoughtful enough to post his presentation on his blog for those of us who will not be attending, in body. He suggests that you will be better off viewing it on TwitterFountain where it will be tweeted live.  Time to swot up quickly on what this is and how to get it to work!

I am just trying out Twitterfall now and finding it works okay, sometimes with a couple minutes of lag (on Mozilla Firefox). There is a ‘flush queue’ button at the top you can press to get new tweets if you feel there is lag.

It appears that Twitterfall is almost a replacement for the classic Twitter portal–think of it as a more customizable (you have a choice of skins, font size, etc) option than Twitter. I wonder at what stage Twitter will want to integrate more of the features that can be seen in offshoots like this?

Update: Matthew Mezey on the Update blog is live blogging this event here so please check there if you, like me, cannot seem to get TwitterFountain working.

security and web 2.0

In light of the upcoming web 2.o open session at CILIP headquarters tomorrow, I thought I should have a look at a document featured in UKeIG’s Elucidate–Top web 2.0 security threats.

This paper mentions that a hacker used a ‘brute force dictionary attack‘ to hack into Barack Obama’s Twitter account and 32 others. These attacks succeed because “people have a tendency to choose passwords which are short (7 characters or fewer), single words found in dictionaries or simple, easily-predicted variations on words, such as appending a digit.”

Basic passwords are easy to hack–nothing new, and something that is related to the perceived desirability of hacking in–I doubt Cilip’s future twitter account would ever be hacked.

The real danger to Cilip, in my opinion, is one that Facebookers are familiar with-that bit of news your friend posted to your wall that was a secret and is now widespread knowledge. Although, I think this can only help a group like Cilip that has struggled with marketing and even keeping its active members in the loop.

This paper suggests that the big picture of employees and job titles on a site like LinkedIn can be detrimental as this information can be used to launch a social engineering attack, for example.

The security paper was methodical but not terribly forward-thinking. What of the accuracy of Twitter and its associated trending tools? If I have a tweet that has nothing to do with swine flu, for example, maybe I will throw in #swineflu just to get more followers by: (a) coming up in more search results and (b) appearing in tools like monitter (a search engine with an ever-updating display to let you monitor the ‘twittersphere’).

A recent article in the Guardian suggests that web 2.0 is dangerous during an epidemic:

The web is famously treacherous as a self-diagnosis tool; a perfect example of how a little information can be dangerous; some Twitter users have been spreading message about not eating pork (it’s not possible to catch swine flu from eating infected meat).

We are taught to consider both context and the authority of the source when evaluating information. On Twitter, however, there really is no context as information comes in 140 character bursts, and, as the Guardian article points out, can we really trust somebody named @budgiebreath to point us the right way?

Some have perhaps benefited by presumably choosing quality information sources to monitor. Veratect, a biosurveillance company, claims to have alerted the CDC about the flu before authorities in Mexico declared there was a problem, according to Wired.

Libraries and research

I pretty much work in a research environment and am lucky to benefit from the historical precedent set by our team being embedded in the team we support.  I know from experience that this isn’t always the case especially in terms of supporting anyone who isn’t an undergraduate in higher education. I’m kicking myself that I missed this JISC event that looked at where libraries are going. As a result I came across a brilliant blog from Peter Murray-Rust who is a scientist at Cambridge University trying to enable routine chemical data to be captured and shared, battling technological and copyright issues. His views on librarians are something worth listening to. Here is an extract from the blog on what he spoke about at the event:

• talking to scientific colleagues.. The main conclusion was that the formal “library” was largely unseen/irrelevant and at best a service department
• raising the subject on my blog and following Twitter and FriendFeed. Feedback was slow until I tweaked the outrage knob slightly and was then mainly from tech-aware librarians. The main thrust was that they were doing a good diverse job which wasn’t appreciated by me or scientists in general.
• I have been described by Brian Kelly as a Critical Friend” to libraries (and I accept the compliment).
• Conclusion: the librarian of the future will not come from the librarian of the present. They will be real revolutionaries.

I like the notion of a critical friend which I am of CILIP, it’s kind of embarrassing how slow it is on the uptake. They’re having a debate at web 2.0 applications next week whilst we, in PMR’s words, just do it.

Guides on how to develop integrated care pathways

So you want some guides/toolkits on how to put together an integrated care pathway? These might help:

A short introduction
Evidence-Based-Medicine.co.uk. What is an integrated care pathway
An eight page introduction to integrated care pathways and how to develop them, along with a short example for adults with MRSA

Guides/toolkits
Integrated Care pathway users in Scotland. A Workbook for People Starting to Develop Integrated Care Pathways
A 68 page workbook developed by ICPUS (Integrated Care Pathway Users in Scotland), a network of people from Scotland, who are interested in or using ICPs. “By the end of this workbook you should have a clear understanding of the ICP tool and how to write and develop one. You should also have gained knowledge of the steps for effective variance tracking and continuous quality improvement as well as an idea of how ICPs can support you in delivering safe and effective care.”

National Leadership and Innovation Agency for Healthcare. Integrated care pathways: a guide to good practice
A 64 page guide to good practice in developing integrated care pathways, developed by the National Leadership and Innovation Agency for Healthcare in Wales. The purpose of the guide is “to assist clinical teams with the implementation of Integrated Care Pathways”

Queensland Health. A Toolkit for Developing a Clinical Pathway
A 23 page toolkit from the Clinical Practice Improvement Team in Queensland, in order to be used as “to assist clinical teams with the implementation of Integrated Care Pathways”.

Development checklist and Audit
Royal Children’s Hospital, Melbourne. Integrated care pathway checklist, and audit.

And an online resource
Protocol Based Care (What is it and how can it help me?), from the NHS Institute. “Protocol based care enables NHS staff to put evidence into practice by addressing the key questions of what should be done, when, where and by whom at a local level.  It provides a framework for working in multi-disciplinary teams. This standardisation of practice reduces variation in the treatment of patients and improves the quality of care.”

What’s that? You don’t want some guides/toolkits on how to put together an integrated care pathway? Well, there’s no pleasing some people.

RSS = FAIL?

The latest issue of Elucidate from the UKIEG includes an interesting link related to the failure of RSS to take off at an enterprise level.

Reasons for lack of take up are variously seen as the radical way it changes access to information, poor software, apathy and the fact it is called RSS.

There seem to have been no end of study days and presentations related to RSS in the health / libraries setting.  (I have even been responsible for some myself see 8.32MB of PPT - NB contains added Peter Godwin on Info Literacy).  But has this translated into wide uptake?

Speaking from the NHS perspective I suspect that uptake by organisations rather than individuals has been limited.  The FADE service are delivering a lot of content as RSS so you would expect that their users are on board.  Colchester Hospital Library offered a Google Reader driven current awareness service but this has not been updated since the person who ran it moved on.  Jason Curtis at SATH has been using RSS with NetVibes to offer an updating service.   I am sure there are plenty of others doing interesting stuff out there.

For most NHS folk access to software can be an issue with desktops locked down and filtered web access.  Though this is not an uncommon situation in the non NHS workplace either.  The National Library for Health included an RSS reader as part of MyLibrary and an RSS Directory (see the presentation linked earlier for more details).  Unfortunately the functionality of the RSS reader was limited and this certainly prevented people from promoting services using this route.

Perhaps there will be a new wave of opportunity as people move to MS Office 2007 and Sharepoint 2007 with better support for RSS in these packages?

200 posts and World Digital Library

I am delighted to say that our dashboard says we have reached the ‘200 posts’ mark. Yay for us!  Sorry, not to sound too self-congratulatory or anything.

Has anyone heard of the World Digital Library? As one listserv poster said, it is well worth a look.  It has a sliding bar that allows you to set the time interval (which ranges from 8000 AD to now) and has a geographic display so that you can click on a continent to see a preview of the kinds of historical documents available.

The World Digital Library is a collaborative project of the U.S. Library of Congress, UNESCO, and other partners.  Oh, and they used real cataloguers in the creation of the digital library, which is nice to hear.

They even invite volunteers to contact them to get involved to “identify important collections that represent a particular country or culture.” So still a work in progress, but over 1000 documents on there. And very aesthetically pleasing I must say.

NHS Evidence Day NHSED-10 and counting….

Well here we are – peering towards the 30th of April and the arrival of NHS Evidence (NB – Site not live at time of writing).  So what do we know?

A fair amount in some ways. 

NICE have a good culture about minutes appearing in public so we can track the progress of developments both through the regular updates to the NICE Board and the minutes of the NHS Evidence Advisory Committee. 

We can also follow the progress of the Accreditation Scheme.  This will see organisations accredited rather than particular documents (a similar model to the Plain English Campaign). 

We know about the search technology selected – Fast Search.  And we can see it in action in a health setting North of the Border.  Thus far reports from those who have tested NHSE are positive.

We know a bit about the visual style - blue, less cluttered and with a strong visual logo (I haven’t seen this in the wild yet so I won’t spoil the surprise).

An email to librarians brings the welcome news that mooted plans to redirect www.library.nhs.uk on to the new domain with effect from the 30th no longer appear to be in effect.  This is a good decision as it would have been a confusing way to transition the users of NLH and gives those working directly with end users a chance to familiarise themselves with the new set up.

One of the decisions I am less sure about is to change the name of the Specialist Libraries to Specialist Collections.  There is a general purge of the stem librar* underway.  I think this is in part due to a concern that “libraries are for librarians” (see page 5 NHSEAC Minutes for March 09).  I have been trying to think of a good analogy – perhaps that restaurants need to be renamed as otherwise people might think they were only for the cooks and waiters who work there – or swimming pools as perhaps these are only for the life guards?  Regardless I am far from convinced that a Specialist Collection sounds like a label less likely to exclude. 

I will be looking for the killer analogy I failed to come up with in the comments…

Spotify – throw your music collection away

How cool is Spotify?

Well, it’s cooler than me, that’s for sure, though of course that’s not saying too much. Still, it’s pretty darn cool, and I’m sure you already know all about it. In case you don’t, go there and click the Get Started button and before you know it you’ll be able to listen to just about any music album you can think of for free. It streams, very efficiently, though your browser and the interface looks like iTunes, so we’re all pretty familiar with it by now I would’ve thought. You get adverts, but only one every 30mins or an hour or so, and the adverts are short and generally more diverting than your usual radio adverts. Or you can pay £9.99 a month and get it all advert free. Who needs a music collection? I listened to Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me by The Cure yesterday for the first time for years, and I’m delighted to report that it still sounds just like heaven…

Update: apparently Spotify is only available at the moment as a beta in “Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Norway, Spain and Sweden. ” Don’t shoot the messenger.