2009: Kristine M. Alpi

Kristine M. Alpi, Director of the William Rand Kenan, Jr. Library of Veterinary Medicine at North Carolina State University, will use the MIS/MLA Career Development Grant to attend the 10th International Congress on Medical Librarianship (ICML)/6th International Conference of Animal Health Information Specialists (ICAHIS) to be held 31 August - 4 September 2009 in Brisbane, Australia. At that meeting, she will present two accepted papers, one on veterinary informatics and the other on dissemination of animal health research findings. She hopes to buoy the growing effort to have veterinary informatics strengthened by the involvement of librarians. The pairing of the ICML and ICAHIS is a once every five year opportunity to bring the spotlight on how librarians can contribute to the growth and success of informatics applications at the interface of human and animal health.

2008: Karen M. Albert and Maureen Knapp

Karen M. Albert, Director of Library Services, Fox Chase Cancer Center, Phila., PA, will use the grant to pursue additional coursework in the areas of research methods and clinical decision support. She wants to study the benefits and usage of links to knowledge-based resources from within the electronic health record and to conduct studies that would demonstrate the value of bringing information resources to the point of care. She also hopes to highlight the importance of librarian participation in these activities.

Maureen "Molly" Knapp, of the John P. Ische Library, Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center, New Orleans, will use the MIS/MLA Career Development Grant to attend the Internet Librarian meeting in Monterey, California in October. This grant will allow her to expand her knowledge of emerging digital tools and trends and their applications to medical informatics.She plans to share what she learns with MLA members by live-blogging the event via the MLA Social Networking Task Force blog.

2007: None Awarded

2006: Ellen Justice

Ellen Justice, Christiana Hospital Library, Christiana Care Health System, Newark, DE, received both the Continuing Education Award and Medical Informatics Section (MIS)/MLA Career Development Grant. The Continuing Education Award provides monetary awards to MLA members to develop knowledge of the theoretical, administrative, or technical aspects of librarianship. Established in 1996 by MIS, the MIS/MLA Career Development Grant supports an activity that will contribute to medical informatics. Justice plans to use her grant to participate in a workshop that will increase her level of expertise in evidence-based medicine.

2005: Ruling Guo and Christine Marton

Ruiling Guo, AHIP, Idaho Health Sciences Library, Idaho State University–Pocatello, is one of two recipients of the grant. She will use her grant to create a Web-based library instruction tutorial on the use of library resources to support distance learning for students in Idaho.

Christine Marton, College of Information Studies, University of British Columbia–Vancouver, Canada, plans to use her award to take courses to further her education in medical informatics for teaching and research.

2004: Margaret Gorman and Sara Anne Hook

Margaret Gorman, Arizona Cancer Center, University of Arizona–Tucson, is one of two recipients of the grant. She plans to use her grant to create a thesaurus to map frequently used medical terminology for the Arizona Cancer Institute.

Sara Anne Hook, School of Informatics, Indiana University–Indianapolis, will use her grant to take two online courses to further her education in health informatics.

2003: Marcy Brown and Mark Vrabel

Mark Vrabel is Librarian for the Oncology Nursing Society (ONS) where he assisted with Phase I of the ONS Evidence-Based Practice Online Resource Center. He is enrolled in the Certificate of Advanced Study in Medical Informatics at the University of Pittsburgh. The award will be used to fund his time and expenses in an informatics project at his institution—Phase II of the Online ONS Evidence-Based Practice Resource Center—as part of a team combining Research and Online Publishing with Mr. Vrabel’s information expertise to create a tool that provides evidence to oncology nurses on which they can base their practice improvements.

Marcy Brown is Medical Librarian at the Forbes Regional Hospital in Monroeville, PA, where she serves on the facility Information Management team, Physician Information Technology group. A member of the Medical Informatics Section, Ms. Brown has served on the Health Information Advisory Board of Medicine on the Net. She is currently pursuing a certificate in Public Health Informatics at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The grant would be used to fund a course on Health Information and Decision Support Systems. The information from this course would be used to expand her role in helping her institution to integrate systems of knowledge-based information and patient-specific clinical data systems.

2002: Mary Linn Bergstrom and Marilyn Teolis

Mary Linn Bergstrom, Head of Education and Outreach of the Biomedical Library, University of California–San Diego (UCSD), was a 2002 award recipient. She has learned throughout her career: MLA CE courses, workshops, seminars and regional and local conferences, professional associations and institutional task forces. Informally she learned a great deal during my tenure at UMass Memorial, where she reported in Information Systems; working in this department at a point of intense investment and growth in the enterprise information systems network created many opportunities to build new skills.

A recipient of an NLM fellowship for the Medical Informatics Course at Marine Biological Laboratory Woods Hole, Massachusetts (2001), she also attended the 2001 AMIA conference and participated in AAMC Western Group on Medical Education Computer Resources in Medical Education (CRIME) activities. I plan to gain further knowledge in the field by taking an online course, either an overview course or a course in clinical decision making from Stanford University. When asked about how the grant will benefit her professional development, she replied: I will also use this award toward attendance at the 2002 AMIA conference in San Antonio TX, where I intend to maintain awareness of the use of handheld devices in clinical informatics initiatives and to follow current trends in the informatics field that are relevant to UCSD School of Medicine and UCSD Healthcare.

Marilyn Teolis, AHIP, is Medical Librarian Coordinator of the Baptist Hospital, Nashville, TN. Baptist Hospital library is part of network of 36 libraries participating in the University of Alabama Digital Libraries and Advanced Web Site Navigation Lab (UA DLAWS Nav Lab). She attended the teleconference about PDAs and CE courses about digital libraries, e-journals etc.

Her plan for the grant was to buy two PDAs for the library and promote their use among physicians and health professionals at Baptist Hospital. There are two goals for the grant. I wanted one Palm‰ to have Internet access through Palm Net for a year. Then I could access the Baptist Digital Library and the World Wide Web with AvantGo, the easy to use, free web-based interface, for Palm Pilots. The Baptist Hospital Medical Library would serve as a role model of PDA access to digital libraries. The second goal was to see if physicians would modify their habit of using PDAs for mostly personal information to using it for clinical purposes. Would physicians utilize their PDAs more often if they had access to Ovid@Hand to help them stay current with the medical literature and assist them in diagnosing and treating patients? A user of Ovid@Hand can record a clinical question into his PDA then sync it with his computer. A Medline search is ordered instantly. A physician can save a search and have it run automatically so that the latest citations are waiting for him to review. Some additional features include a drug database and access to over 700 disease profiles. A before and after survey of physician PDA usage was planned.

2001: Susan London

Susan London is currently Executive Associate Director for Academic Affairs at the Ruth Lilly Medical Library of Indiana University. She used the award to attend the Stanford University Medical Informatics Short Course.

2000: Kathryn E. Kerdolff and Kathleen F. Bauer

Kathryn E. Kerdolff (Kathy) MLIS, AHIP, is a Reference Librarian for Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center in New Orleans. The grant allowed her to complete the State Morbidity Database (SMD), a web catalog containing the titles, publication histories, and library locations of complete runs of the communicable disease reports (morbidity reports) from each of the fifty states. The SMD is also a web-searchable bibliographic citation database of the articles in these publications. Articles are indexed using Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), as well as common terms. The SMD database is equipped with the linking function to connect to full-text web publications, or to a library catalog if full-text is not available.

State morbidity publications are published monthly or bi-monthly by each State's Department of Health. They are not indexed by any of the commercial bibliographic database or indexing services, their publishing histories are somewhat erratic, and State Public Health Departments change their names, their sections, their management, etc. as frequently as they change their address! Despite their irregularities, these publications continue to provide up-to-date statistical health information. Kathy presented a number of posters and contributed papers at library, public health, and information management conferences promoting the database.

Kathleen F. Bauer is a Librarian at the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library, Yale University.
She will use her award to design a study that will be used to refine Cushing/Whitney Medical Library's Web site and to create a new digital library model for the Yale School of Nursing.

1999: Ruth Riley and Gang "Wendy" Wu

Ruth Riley is Associate Director, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Library in Little Rock.
She will use her award to attend a conference, Improving Health in a Digital World.

Gang (Wendy) Wu is Medical Librarian, Shiffman Library, Wayne State University, Detroit.
Ms. Wu will use the award for Web-based classes at the University of Michigan School of Information.

1998: none awarded

1997: Linda Hogan and Julie Johnson McGowan, Ph.D.

In 1997, the first Medical Informatics Section (MIS)/MLA Career Development Grants were awarded to Linda Hogan and Julie J. McGowan, Ph.D., AHIP.

Julie J. McGowan, Ph.D., AHIP, Ruth Lilly Medical Library, Indiana University School of Medicine–Indianapolis, describes how the award benefited her work: “I used the award money to conduct a pilot research project on the efficacy of Larry Weed’s Problem Knowledge Couplers in primary care and specialty practice. The money was able to jump-start this research, which I subsequently published in the [October 1999] Bulletin of the Medical Library Association.”

Linda Hogan is now Director, Medical Informatics, Pittsburgh Mercy Health Systems (PMHS) where she is responsible for development and support of PMHS Information Services initiatives focused on clinical information systems, the electronic medical record and maximizing physician access to information. She is also an Adjunct Professor, Mercy Hospital School of Nursing (1999 - present), and Ohio Valley General Hospital School of Nursing (1997 - present) in knowledge based management and nursing informatics.

The MIS/MLA, NLM/Woods Hole Fellowship in Medical Informatics, and affiliation with the Center for Biomedical Informatics at the University of Pittsburgh, all contributed to the successful completion of Ph.D (with a dissertation in the area of Consumer Health Informatics) and helped determine the career direction. The MLA/MIS Award was used towards tuition during final classes toward doctorate in Library and Information Science.